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Title: Ayn Rand's Heroes: Between and Beyond Good and Evil.
Creator: Powell, Robert L., Fowler, Douglas, Cloonan, William, Picart, Caroline “Kay", Fenstermaker, John, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This study examines Ayn Rand's fiction in relation to twentieth century literature and culture. Despite its linguistic potential, "The Fountainhead" is not good art and does not represent romantic fiction as Rand claims. It is truly her own reactionary prose which rebels against literary movements she hated such as naturalism. Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is really a right-wing form of Existentialism and Marxism. Ayn Rand and George Orwell both endured shocking life experiences which...
Show moreThis study examines Ayn Rand's fiction in relation to twentieth century literature and culture. Despite its linguistic potential, "The Fountainhead" is not good art and does not represent romantic fiction as Rand claims. It is truly her own reactionary prose which rebels against literary movements she hated such as naturalism. Rand's philosophy of Objectivism is really a right-wing form of Existentialism and Marxism. Ayn Rand and George Orwell both endured shocking life experiences which shaped their ideas and fiction. Rand learned extreme capitalism while Orwell learned skepticism. Rand's skeptical heroes are the most interesting of her canon. Rand's "The Fountainhead" is a blend of Friedrich Nietzsche's philosophy of the Superman and the typical American capitalist hero. Gail Wynand, Rand's most Nietzschean character, is her true hero and Dominique is her true villain. Rand's fiction doesn't fit easily into any specific literary genres. Therefore, popular writers, such as Mickey Spillane and Edna Ferber may have been influenced by Rand. Furthermore, similar tendencies of her work can also be seen in choice literature novels of Simone deBeauvoir, Toni Morrison and Joyce Carol Oates. As a capitalist novel, "The Fountainhead" sits among an unappreciated group of works by the literary establishment which should be understood-- if not embraced. The 1943 work portrays capitalist heroes without their loveable 'common man' aspect. Rand's capitalists are rebels with the American idea, that, in pursuit of their excessive selfish desires-- the sky's the limit. Randian heroes—anti-heroes of productive work, have continually re-emerged in American popular culture. Rand's fiction is popular because it's entertaining trash that Americans love. Loveable common man tycoons such as Bill Gates and the late Sam Walton have turned into the anti-heroic Don King and the late Ken Lay. Anti-heroic icons such as Gordon Gekko of the film "Wall Street", in the Randian tradition, show us the ugly but true side of American capitalist culture that is important for us to expose, admit and examine.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0452
Format: Thesis

Title: One Plus One Equals Three.
Creator: Steinmetz, Kristi Marie, Ortiz-Taylor, Sheila, McRorie, Sally, Fenstermaker, John, Moore, Dennis, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation is a creative non-fiction manuscript following in the combined literary traditions of the American Captivity Narrative (e.g., Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Hélène Cixous's écriture feminine, and Gloria Anzaldúa's "autobiographical consciousness" (Irene Lara "Daughter of Coatlicue" 54). The project speaks to and for the common yet controversial reality in our society of the choices – for both natural mother and natural father – surrounding pregnancy...
Show moreThis dissertation is a creative non-fiction manuscript following in the combined literary traditions of the American Captivity Narrative (e.g., Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), Hélène Cixous's écriture feminine, and Gloria Anzaldúa's "autobiographical consciousness" (Irene Lara "Daughter of Coatlicue" 54). The project speaks to and for the common yet controversial reality in our society of the choices – for both natural mother and natural father – surrounding pregnancy. The project also provides an account of contemporary America's response to single-parenting between the years 2002 and 2006. Although the memoir is a personal investigation of pregnancy, abandonment-grief, birth, and mothering, this work is an act of transformation and healing that extends outward into the culture in that it is a textual moment of learning and knowing. The memoir is a process of interaction Anzaldúa would refer to as conocimiento: of writing self beyond self (Lara 44-45).
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0376
Format: Thesis

Title: Confessional Poetry and Blog Culture in the Age of Autobiography.
Creator: Price, Deidre Dowling, Epstein, Andrew, Kalbian, Aline, Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Outka, Paul, Edwards, Leigh, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: M. L. Rosenthal's 1959 labeling of Robert Lowell's Life Studies as "Confessional," initiated a debate about the literary value of autobiographical writing. At the center of this controversy was the taboo subject matter explored by the confessional poets: madness, sexuality, alcoholism, depression, and suicide. Another form of autobiographical writing which similarly polarizes audience despite being born in 1999 is the blog. In this study, I explore various shared traits between confessional...
Show moreM. L. Rosenthal's 1959 labeling of Robert Lowell's Life Studies as "Confessional," initiated a debate about the literary value of autobiographical writing. At the center of this controversy was the taboo subject matter explored by the confessional poets: madness, sexuality, alcoholism, depression, and suicide. Another form of autobiographical writing which similarly polarizes audience despite being born in 1999 is the blog. In this study, I explore various shared traits between confessional poems of the 1960s and modern-day personal blogs and aim to demonstrate how we might read them both as part of the larger conversation about the culture of confession and the age of autobiography. This dissertation looks closely at works by three confessional poets, all of whose writing have recently experienced resurgence in popular culture—John Berryman, Sylvia Plath, and Anne Sexton—and draws a parallel between characteristic traits in their works and contemporary blogging practices. I borrow Berryman's "Henry" from Dream Songs to illuminate the similarities between a poetic persona and an online avatar and argue that Berryman's broken syntax foreshadows the fragmentation of language at work in modern-day blogs. I regard Plath's contemporary cult following as an indicator of her acute audience awareness and explore how various Plath poems function as highly performative works of art intended to elicit a desired effect from readers. I compare Sexton's writing about taboo marital and maternal subjects to the recent phenomenon of mommyblogging and explain how Sexton's subversive poems paved the way for later women to engage in open, unapologetic life writing in blog communities. Ultimately, I argue for the reading of personal blogs as cultural artifacts and for the consideration of confessional blogs as a remediated American literary genre.
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Date Issued: 2010
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0450
Format: Thesis

Title: Sleeping with an Insomniac.
Creator: Stewart, Steven J., Kirby, David, Galeano, Juan Carlos, Bickley, Bruce, Kimbrell, James, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: A collection of original poetry which often engages the twentieth-century American poetic strands of neo-surrealism and language writing.
Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0392
Format: Thesis

Title: Getting to Yes.
Creator: Eville, William Harding, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Baggott, Julianna, Winegardner, Mark, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The following master's thesis includes three stories. These stories are fiction and any resemblance to real people is not intended. The stories range from coming of age tales to cultural satire.
Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0432
Format: Thesis

Title: Evoking the Salon: Eliza Haywood's the Female Spectator & the Conversation of Protofeminist Space.
Creator: Dowd, Emily Joan, Burke, Helen, Carbonell, Joyce, Ward, Candace, Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: "Evoking the Salon: Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator & The Conversation of Protofeminist Space" reads Eliza Haywood's 18th century periodical, The Female Spectator, as a reenactment of the feminocentric French salon within the discourse of print. Such a perspective reorients our perception of the periodical as a women's miscellany, making it, instead, a unified hetero-intellectual space that participates in polyvalent, protofeminist gender construction. My reading of The Female Spectator...
Show more"Evoking the Salon: Eliza Haywood's The Female Spectator & The Conversation of Protofeminist Space" reads Eliza Haywood's 18th century periodical, The Female Spectator, as a reenactment of the feminocentric French salon within the discourse of print. Such a perspective reorients our perception of the periodical as a women's miscellany, making it, instead, a unified hetero-intellectual space that participates in polyvalent, protofeminist gender construction. My reading of The Female Spectator uses the salon model of discourse to argue for Haywood's deep interrogation of Addison and Steele's seminal periodical, The Spectator, Haywood's own subversively erotic novel, Love in Excess, and the conservative feminism of Mary Astell. In retracing these conversations, "Evoking the Salon" suggests we see Haywood's periodical as evoking a new 'republic of letters' in England, a legacy necessary for the formation of English feminist consciousness thereafter.
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Date Issued: 2010
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0682
Format: Thesis

Title: Reforming the Politics of Sensibility: George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim Dorsey & the Narrative of Social Inaction.
Creator: Dowd, Emily Joan, Faulk, Barry, Burke, Helen, Edwards, Leigh, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Reforming the Politics of Sensibility: George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim Dorsey & the Narrative of Social Inaction maintains that key narrative modes in Twentieth Century political fiction are indebted to earlier manifestations in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century modes of sensibility in British fiction, and are likewise confronted by the socio-historical politics of these modes. These novels, stretching across time and geographical space, illustrate the continued pervasiveness of these modes...
Show moreReforming the Politics of Sensibility: George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Tim Dorsey & the Narrative of Social Inaction maintains that key narrative modes in Twentieth Century political fiction are indebted to earlier manifestations in Eighteenth and Nineteenth Century modes of sensibility in British fiction, and are likewise confronted by the socio-historical politics of these modes. These novels, stretching across time and geographical space, illustrate the continued pervasiveness of these modes and their role in the narrative of socio-political reform. Each chapter addresses a changing narrative relationship with sentimental politics and the implications of this shift on the fictional project of reform. Together, Orwell, Vonnegut, and Dorsey represent a trajectory of politically-oriented authors whose texts reflect the changing conflicts between reformative aims and sentimental modes. Each author's relationship to the sentimental sets the tone for the socio-political work of his novel. Although this critical reading may seem eclectic in mingling of sensibility, melodrama, satire, and postmodernism, the use of this critical work illustrates the important relationships between them. This thesis a collection of critical discourse that attempts to address the socio-political work of popular novels, and the complicated interaction of sentimentality, satire, and narrative within them. By examining sentimental modes through this selection of novels, this thesisdemonstrates the roll they continue to play in the political quietism so dissatisfying to critics of popular fiction
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0683
Format: Thesis

Title: Reconfiguring the American Family: Alternate Paradigms in African American and Latina Familial Configurations.
Creator: Wright, Mary Elizabeth, Braendlin, Bonnie, Nudd, Donna, Saladin, Linda, McGregory, Jerrilyn, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In the United States authors whose work concerns ethnicity face a host of problems, of which the most obvious remains the preconceived notion that ethnicthemed literature is subordinate to Eurocentric literary work. Despite continued racial and ethnic prejudices, many women of color writing within the past thirty years work to triumph over such categorical stereotypes and through their efforts earned Nobel and Pulitzer prizes and tremendous readership loyalties. The African American and...
Show moreIn the United States authors whose work concerns ethnicity face a host of problems, of which the most obvious remains the preconceived notion that ethnicthemed literature is subordinate to Eurocentric literary work. Despite continued racial and ethnic prejudices, many women of color writing within the past thirty years work to triumph over such categorical stereotypes and through their efforts earned Nobel and Pulitzer prizes and tremendous readership loyalties. The African American and Latina women discussed in this dissertation stand up against the ideological, cultural, sociohistorical, and political voices still attempting to repress them, as they write to disseminate and preserve specific ethnic and cultural ideologies and practices. Through rewriting the Freudian family romance into family narratives, they explicitly express cultural identity. By asserting difference concerning families and communities, specifically in a society still largely resistant but more accepting of ethnic and cultural practices, these women insure that values and practices from their own respective backgrounds will survive assimilation attempts from the culture at large. As a result, in addition to identifying with a similar readership, they instruct those from dissimilar backgrounds about cultural ideologies to shrinIn this study I aim to identify and discuss how portrayals of fictional families and communities in contemporary African American and Latina literature serve as valuable pedagogical tools in the advancement of a truly heterogeneous society. To accomplish this end, I utilize selective texts from four authors whose publishing histories range from 1970 to the present: Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye 1970; Paule Marshall, Praisesong for the Widow 1984; Julia Alvarez, How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents 1991; and Cristina Garcia, Dreaming in Cuban 1992. I focus on the methods each writer engages from her specific cultural heritage to redefine the Eurocentric, middle-class American nuclear family into one that adequately represents our pluralistic culture. In resisting a dominant discourse that protects and promotes a nuclear family ideology, these authors construct paradigmatic narratives that preserve multifaceted family and communal ideologies, specifically extended families and reliance upon communal support, of African American, Dominican American, and Cuban American (Latina/o) value systems. In order to support ethnic variations as positive elements in a multicultural society and to redefine the American family as a varied and inclusive entity where an extended family or one comprised of a variety of nonconsanguine members is just as valid as a nuclear family, we must create additional familial paradigms to the Freudian family romance. Texts that privilege a multiplicity of configurations help readers of all identities achieve a greater sense of ownership in this country that calls itself pluralistic.k the discursive boundaries between "dominant" and "subordinate" groups.
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Date Issued: 2002
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0747
Format: Thesis

Title: Voices along the Road.
Creator: Woolley, Debra, Kimbrell, James, Galeano, Juan Carlos, Kirby, David, McGregory, Jerrilyn, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Voices along the Road is a collection of poems that explores the immigrant experience, detailing three worlds that forge a Caribbean-American voice. All three sections of the manuscript examine an identity that comes directly, almost solely, from her surroundings. In the tradition of Louise Bennett, the use of dialect aside, Section I attempts to comprehend a narrow Caribbean existence by scrutinizing a life that is tied to nature, family, and country. Section II sees the world slightly more...
Show moreVoices along the Road is a collection of poems that explores the immigrant experience, detailing three worlds that forge a Caribbean-American voice. All three sections of the manuscript examine an identity that comes directly, almost solely, from her surroundings. In the tradition of Louise Bennett, the use of dialect aside, Section I attempts to comprehend a narrow Caribbean existence by scrutinizing a life that is tied to nature, family, and country. Section II sees the world slightly more broadly, but there the speaker is also acutely aware of her identity and the complexity in bridging the two worlds she now finds herself simultaneously occupying, one immediate, the other existing only through reflection. Section III nearly abandons the collection's Caribbean roots and gives voice to a Floridian experience that in many ways echoes some of the disquiet in the earlier poems. Overall, whether detailing a morning in Jamaica or an afternoon in Miramar, the poems are made of imagery and themes keenly observed and lyrically interpreted. Noticeable is the fact that many of the poems are written about small creatures—ants, an iguana, dragonflies, and other small players in the natural world. Whether it is the rendering of lush Caribbean fields or the crackling metropolis of South Florida, the time and effort paid to the pulsings around her underscore the determination of the speaker to make real and ardent sense of landscape. Form too plays an important role in this collection. Certain poems are sonnet-inspired and adhere loosely to the form's strict requirements by playing with meter and rhythm and using off rhymes. One even exchanges end rhymes for anagrams. A villanelle also makes an appearance, but the most apparent form is the prose poem. It emerges as a key element in understanding this collection. Because of the history of Caribbean culture, the art of storytelling is an ingrained traditional method of keeping the culture alive; it carries with it the facts and perceptions of the observer and consequent storyteller. These prose pieces are no different from their verse counterparts as they seek to tell the story of a person, a family, a people, and maybe of times and practices that no longer exist. It is the hope of the poet that, individually, the poems will find homes, and, collectively, they will join with other Caribbean, Caribbean-American, and American voices along the road.
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Date Issued: 2010
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0762
Format: Thesis

Title: The Blue House Party.
Creator: Smith, Nathaniel Jonathan, Suarez, Virgil F., Kimbrell, James H., Stuckey-French, Ned C., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: THE BLUE HOUSE PARTY, like Hemingway's NICK ADAMS STORIES, follows the development of a character from childhood to adulthood. THE BLUE HOUSE PARTY's chronologically arranged contents, though loosely sutured together, form a mosaic whole. The characters and events in THE BLUE HOUSE PARTY are fictional and should be read as such.
Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0341
Format: Thesis

Title: Political Priests: The Role of Religious Figures in Modern American Drama.
Creator: Appling, Leonard Troy, Gontarski, S.E., Jumonville, Neil, Fenstermaker, John, Laughlin, Karen, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Understanding religious imagery and its uses on stage is essential to interpreting drama, beginning as it did in the sacred rituals of ancient Greece. In post-World-War-II America, playwrights divested religious elements of their sacredness, using them as signifiers of secular humanism instead, in order to construct or critique ideological tenets central to the American consciousness. This study examines the relation on the modern stage between religion (both formal and civil) and the concept...
Show moreUnderstanding religious imagery and its uses on stage is essential to interpreting drama, beginning as it did in the sacred rituals of ancient Greece. In post-World-War-II America, playwrights divested religious elements of their sacredness, using them as signifiers of secular humanism instead, in order to construct or critique ideological tenets central to the American consciousness. This study examines the relation on the modern stage between religion (both formal and civil) and the concept of "America" in the works of James Baldwin, Bill C. Davis, Christopher Durang, Diane Shaffer, and John Patrick Shanley, who each used religion to create conformity with (or critique of) the sense of American exceptionalism that dominated the post-WWII period. This study focuses on the characteristics of the clergy depicted by these playwrights: pragmatism, marginalization, prescription, and paranoia. While narrow in scope, the thematic concerns these characters represent echo other religious elements such as those of Arthur Miller's Crucible or Edward Albee's Tiny Alice. Each of the playwrights in this study attempt to re-code the religious signs—in this case, their characters—to effect an understanding in the audience that these people represent a larger social commentary. Building on theatre anthropology and semiotics, especially the work of Victor Turner, Peter Brook, and Keir Elam, as well as theorists of American civil religion such as Robert Bellah, this study will demonstrate the ways religion has been used on stage to define American ideology, as well as establish the link between dramatic clergy and the larger societal figures they represent.
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Date Issued: 2010
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0225
Format: Thesis

Title: Their Synaptic Selves: Memory and Language in Beckett and Joyce.
Creator: Anderson, Dustin, Gontarksi, S.E., Boehrer, Bruce, Berry, R.M., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This project is an attempt to reexamine the linguistic shifts that memory events force in Beckett and Joyce, specifically how spatialization and mapping affect memory in the work these authors. By considering the headway made by contemporary thinkers and writers, such as Bergson (and later writers such as Deleuze), we can come to understand better the complex and elusive approaches through which these authors transformed the way we use language and read texts today. This study is set up as a...
Show moreThis project is an attempt to reexamine the linguistic shifts that memory events force in Beckett and Joyce, specifically how spatialization and mapping affect memory in the work these authors. By considering the headway made by contemporary thinkers and writers, such as Bergson (and later writers such as Deleuze), we can come to understand better the complex and elusive approaches through which these authors transformed the way we use language and read texts today. This study is set up as a companion to how each of these authors deals with memory and its role in language—memory and language are not things, but events. Chapter two focuses on Beckett's engagement with Bergsonian notions of space, time, and duration as they relate to the specific instances or events of memory (or a glissade or slippage) as we might read Beckett informed by both Bergson and Alain Badiou's concept of "evental sites." Chapter three examines the intent and impetus behind Beckett's "language of the unword," and how it relates directly to issues of memory and the brain. We will see how specific language acts (in this case serial repetition) unseat the received meaning or Bergsonian "habit-memory" of the word (in effect, creating a moment of slippage) to find the something or nothing that hides or lurks behind the barrier created by the word. As the memory event occurs, or rather fails to occur in Watt, we see a correlative shift in language. As memory is disturbed, so is Watt's mental capacity to communicate. The operational memory (of words) turns his language into something nearly unintelligible. As a counterpart to Beckett's approach to memory, chapter four discuses a specific (though endemic) instance of Joyce's approach to transformative language, wherein as language is remembered, it becomes literalized first through text, and then through the consumed body as an attempt (and failure) of creating a permanently accurate memory through an act of concretized language, specifically writing. Chapter five, then, turns to Joyce's vastly different approach to spatialized memory (specifically the act of forgetting), as he fraudulently inscribes it on the history of his nation.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0198
Format: Thesis

Title: Lydia Maria Child: Author, Activist, Abolitionist.
Creator: Anderson, Paula J., Fenstermaker, John, Bickley, Bruce, Rowe, Anne, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: During the nineteenth century, Lydia Maria Child was widely recognized for her contributions to American non-fiction, literature and journalism during a career that spanned six decades. She was an activist, abolitionist, and champion of equal rights for all. Today, Child's accomplishments are known to few but the most ardent scholars of the period, yet her enlightened approaches to issues of race, gender and cultural equality are as vital in our time as they were when she penned them. Much of...
Show moreDuring the nineteenth century, Lydia Maria Child was widely recognized for her contributions to American non-fiction, literature and journalism during a career that spanned six decades. She was an activist, abolitionist, and champion of equal rights for all. Today, Child's accomplishments are known to few but the most ardent scholars of the period, yet her enlightened approaches to issues of race, gender and cultural equality are as vital in our time as they were when she penned them. Much of what Child wrote nearly two centuries ago can be directly applied to the social challenges of the twenty-first century. For this reason, she is the object of study for this thesis, which this author fervently hopes will help to reacquaint the American reading public with messages from another time that must also be heeded in our own.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0199
Format: Thesis

Title: Videodrome, Trauma, and Terrorism: An Examination of Organzational and Emotional Dynamics.
Creator: Arroyo, David, Picart, Kay, Faulk, Barry, Suarez, Virgil, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis is an examination of David Cronenberg's Videodrome. In the course of the thesis I compare a fictional account of terrorist activity to the behaviors and organizational machinery of genuine terrorist organizations such as the Army of God and Al-Qaeda. This is important in establishing the veracity of the film as an expression of terrorism, while allowing consideration for the emotional trauma of 9/11. Although the film was made in 1983 in the waning years of the cold war,...
Show moreThis thesis is an examination of David Cronenberg's Videodrome. In the course of the thesis I compare a fictional account of terrorist activity to the behaviors and organizational machinery of genuine terrorist organizations such as the Army of God and Al-Qaeda. This is important in establishing the veracity of the film as an expression of terrorism, while allowing consideration for the emotional trauma of 9/11. Although the film was made in 1983 in the waning years of the cold war, Videodrome is surprisingly in tune with the traumas of the post 9/11 audience.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0238
Format: Thesis

Title: "Fortify the City with Your Tempered Pen": Building Agency in the "City of Ladies" Through Text, Paratext, and Media.
Creator: Smith, Julia Marie, Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Coldiron, A.E.B, Neal, Michael, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In an effort to enhance disciplinary understanding of agency especially for women, recover evidence of women exercising agency historically, and shed light on current debates concerning the interaction between word and image in rhetoric, I explore the extent to which Christine de Pizan, a medieval woman writer, invented and articulated her rhetorical agency. For Christine, the text, the image, and the medium of the manuscript are significant in the development of rhetorical agency; the focus...
Show moreIn an effort to enhance disciplinary understanding of agency especially for women, recover evidence of women exercising agency historically, and shed light on current debates concerning the interaction between word and image in rhetoric, I explore the extent to which Christine de Pizan, a medieval woman writer, invented and articulated her rhetorical agency. For Christine, the text, the image, and the medium of the manuscript are significant in the development of rhetorical agency; the focus of this thesis is on the nature of that agency, particularly how rhetorical agency is invented within the "City of Ladies" folios from her collected works in Harley Ms. 4431. I frame my study of Christine de Pizan and rhetorical agency with Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's work on agency, a particularly powerful construct for my project, because it provides space for both text and paratext and it grapples with the postmodern moment while simultaneously retaining its applicability for historical studies. I begin by examining how Christine's agency emerged through the dialogic between conventions of textual forms. In particular, I consider Campbell's definition that rhetorical agency occurs in texts, because "texts have agency" and are "effected through form" (Campbell 3). Rhetorical agency emerges as Christine complies with cultural expectations concerning the different conventions of form and then subsequently subverts those same conventions to create a space of resistance for women. I explore how Christine reveals her artistry or rhetorical skills when she manipulates the visual aspects of the manuscript page or paratexts, the incidentals and the miniatures, so that they demonstrate her agency. According to Campbell, artistry occurs when "heuristic skills" respond to contingencies" for which there are no precise or universal precepts, although skilled practitioners are alert to recurring patterns" (Campbell 12). Christine complies with the traditional patterns of the paratext, but subverts those patterns, when she repeats traditional paratext with differences. These differences gesture to the text, other elements of the page, and beyond and, in the process, layer new meaning into the manuscript. I then follow with an examination of the manuscript as a medium, where text and paratext function together to communicate meaning. Though both text and paratext have their own rhetorical agency, Christine invents her agency as the "point[s] of articulation" for the manuscript (Campbell 3). Christine executed a great deal of control over the production of her manuscript, which means her rhetorical agency occurs when she articulates her meaning through her authority and negotiation of the materiality and cultural significance of the medium. Because Christine's rhetorical agency emerges from the text, paratext, and manuscript, an examination of Christine's manuscript, Harley Ms. 4431, provides a new look at postmodern agency and the rhetorical agency of medieval manuscripts. Interestingly, Christine wrote at a significant transitional period for ideology and technology and instead of articulating a traditional historical or humanist theory of agency, she performs a complex agency, which is reminiscent of postmodern agency and raises some questions regarding the nature of agency during the medieval era. In addition, the complicated agency created within medieval manuscripts as the verbal and visual texts came together within the medium will contribute to questions of agency and media.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0359
Format: Thesis

Title: In Search of Something Akin to Freedom: Black Women, Slavery, and Power.
Creator: Smith, Katrina Songanett, Ward, Candace, McGregory, Jerrilyn, Rai, Amit, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis examines both historical and fictional representations of interracial relationships in the 18th century. My argument in this project is two-fold. First, I argue that some black women used sexual relationships with white men to gain advantages for themselves and their fellow slaves. Second, I argue that novelists of the time period re-wrote history in an attempt to erase the positive aspects of miscegenation.
Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0353
Format: Thesis

Title: White-Washing History: Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s the Clansman as Novel and Play.
Creator: Rouse, Kristen L., Bickley, Bruce, Moore, Dennis, Winegardner, Mark, Green, Elna, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Thomas Dixon, Jr.'s 1905 novel, The Clansman, was an instant bestseller and its subsequent theater version toured the nation for five years. The novel and play later became the basis for the full-length motion picture and box-office smash, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dixon's story, despite its gross historical inaccuracies, served as a popular history of Reconstruction, echoing contemporary academic prejudices and reinforcing the codes of white masculinity and racial supremacy that had come...
Show moreThomas Dixon, Jr.'s 1905 novel, The Clansman, was an instant bestseller and its subsequent theater version toured the nation for five years. The novel and play later became the basis for the full-length motion picture and box-office smash, The Birth of a Nation (1915). Dixon's story, despite its gross historical inaccuracies, served as a popular history of Reconstruction, echoing contemporary academic prejudices and reinforcing the codes of white masculinity and racial supremacy that had come under question at the turn of the twentieth century. This process of re-visioning history to validate popular prejudices is key to understanding the creation and success of Dixon's most famous—and notorious—contribution to American culture.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0305
Format: Thesis

Title: Solitary Rambles and Stifling Sickrooms: Disease and Gender in Jane Austen's Fiction.
Creator: Smith, Kelly Bryan, Walker, Eric, Hanson, Margaret Kennedy, Ward, Candace, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Jane Austen's use of disease in her novels is crucial to the interpretation of her work. The most current Austen scholarship continues to debate her political leanings and motivations. John Wiltshire sees an important link between illness and the fate of women in Austen's novels. This means that the instances of disease in Austen are significant to the interpretation of gender politics in eighteenth and nineteenth century England. It is important to pay attention to indisposed women in Austen...
Show moreJane Austen's use of disease in her novels is crucial to the interpretation of her work. The most current Austen scholarship continues to debate her political leanings and motivations. John Wiltshire sees an important link between illness and the fate of women in Austen's novels. This means that the instances of disease in Austen are significant to the interpretation of gender politics in eighteenth and nineteenth century England. It is important to pay attention to indisposed women in Austen for this very reason. Illness in general, and especially feigned illness, can be seen as a source of power for women, a means used by female characters in Austen to exert control over their own lives through subversive means. Disease in Austen's novels also serves to reflect the morals of her characters in the midst of a changing cultural landscape. Another critic, Mary Poovey, observes that proper morality was in a state of fluctuation during Jane Austen's life, and her writings mirror this uncertainty. Many female authors before Austen reinforced the traditional role of women in society, but Austen's ambiguity of tone and varying treatment of her heroines calls her political positions into question. In this thesis, I seek to explore the unexamined area where the readings of Wiltshire and Poovey potentially overlap. I hope to build a bridge between Wiltshire's study of the body and Poovey's examination of female propriety. Firstly, I examine instances in Austen's novels of men and women who are punished or reformed by disease. I find that the narratives are not set up in such a way that Austen is condemning all supposedly improper behavior. Often the women who are punished, for example, Marianne Dashwood, are the more favorably depicted characters. At other times, those who are reformed disappear from the narrative, so that the reader cannot tell whether the behavioral changes are permanent. To bring the role of disease into sharper focus, I next look into another of its aspects, the more visible role of invalids and hypochondriacs. In Jane Austen's works, hypochondriacs and invalids serve as examples of men and women who use disease to subvert their social roles. Some succeed while others fail. Why? Does Austen see danger in subversive behavior, or is she simply reflecting some of the values of her time? In order to try to resolve these questions, my last section examines how healthy characters are depicted in Austen's novels. In the end, I conclude that unlimited behavioral freedom, especially for women, is problematic. In order to find physical and social health within the society of Austen's time, women need to have a degree of physical and intellectual in order to be more productive members of society. The healthiest women have a proper man to help guide them, but that isn't to say that men should be in full control. The healthiest men need female guidance, too. Perhaps this is Austen's way of trying to increase female freedom without overturning the patriarchal order altogether.
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0347
Format: Thesis

Title: The Return of Paul Duncan.
Creator: Atkinson, Dustin, Winegardner, Mark, Baggott, Julianna, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: "Let's take for granted that the notion of eternal return is utterly true," writes Will Duncan, from prison, as he finally reveals his embarrassing secret to the reader: his earnest belief that his cousin, the infamous Paul Duncan, is the actual, living reincarnation of Jesse James. Of course, Will explains, this theory is less crazy by degrees, in his eyes, while he serves time for helping his cousin rob the first National Bank of MaxMart (the largest retailer in the world) on the day of its...
Show more"Let's take for granted that the notion of eternal return is utterly true," writes Will Duncan, from prison, as he finally reveals his embarrassing secret to the reader: his earnest belief that his cousin, the infamous Paul Duncan, is the actual, living reincarnation of Jesse James. Of course, Will explains, this theory is less crazy by degrees, in his eyes, while he serves time for helping his cousin rob the first National Bank of MaxMart (the largest retailer in the world) on the day of its grand opening. Will Duncan's narrative serves as the first official biography of his cousin, who did in fact become famous briefly before he died. The novel begins on the day of Paul's return to his hometown of Josephine, Arkansas, after a four-year absence. He initially fled on the eve of his trial for vehicular manslaughter; when he and Will were twenty, they were in a car crash which resulted in the death of the driver of the other car. After Paul comes home, Will attempts to reconcile with his cousin and former best friend. However, Paul has changed drastically. For instance, he carries a pistol. He is also furious to learn that MaxMart has built a sprawling distribution center on the land which he thought he would one day inherit from his father. The two boys go on a road trip to California, from which Will never truly returns. Meanwhile, Ed Brantley, an FBI agent in Little Rock and a law school buddy of Will's father (a local judge), recognizes a mug shot and travels to Josephine just in time to cross paths with the boys. The boys escape to Houston, where Paul has two friends: Jackson Thibodeaux and Victoria Sanchez. While hiding out, Will learns of Paul's four years away, which he offers as a narrative that comprises Book II. In it, Will tells of Paul's initial escape from Josephine at twenty-years old and his struggle to survive and avoid capture. Paul bounces around from a suburban drug house in central Arkansas to New Orleans, where he meets Thibodeaux and Victoria, to New York, where he entertains wild ideas of becoming a successful businessman using a fraudulent resume, and finally to Ohio, where Paul finally extinguishes any hope for living a life he could be proud of. In Ohio, Paul resorts to sticking up a gas station, halfway hoping to get caught. But it works. No longer afraid of much, including what becomes of him, he goes home because his father has been diagnosed with cancer. After simmering in Houston for months, Paul finally initiates his plan for revenge against MaxMart by assaulting delivery trucks, the big eighteen wheelers, on the highway after they leave the distribution center built on his father's former land. Thibodeaux helps, following Paul's leadership and promises of money coming soon. Will feels as though he's stepped onto quicksand. Without lifting a finger, the newspapers are including him as a suspect in everything Paul does. Eventually, he throws up his hands and joins in. And MaxMart decides to open their first bank. By this time, the boys have garnered a huge amount of attention from both law enforcement and the media. However, instead of being universally condemned, many in the community—and nationally as well—support them, or at least support the sentiment of the slogan they mark on every truck they hit: DESTROY MAXMART. Interspersed through Book III is the narrative of Maxwell Foster, MaxMart's founder. Will tells his own version of the now famous story of how Foster rose up through the ranks of retail by relentless effort and business acumen. Fueled by the principle of overstocking and underselling, his MaxMart franchise became the biggest company in the retail industry, and then eventually, around the turn of the century, the largest single employer in the world. At the beginning of the narrative, Max Foster has recently stepped down as CEO after more than fifty years. Without his guidance and ties to the Arkansas community, the current Board of Directors of MaxMart begin a push for a new direction: to move the company out of Arkansas. This decision is the catalyst for those who do not wish to condemn the crimes of Paul and Will and their gang. The Return of Paul Duncan is an investigation, not of the American Dream, but of those who seek it out. It is about the distinctly American mythology of the self-made, the Horatio Alger figure, and the idea that people who become the subjects of myths and legends are ultimately unknowable. It is dark, occasionally violent, and often funny. Will uses the life and outlandish success of Maxwell Foster to contrast against the frustrated, unrealistic, and persistently failed ambitions of Paul Duncan. Also for contrast is a young hip-hop artist from Memphis who crosses paths with Paul a couple of times, and, of course, the life of Jesse James, which is analogous to the life of Paul Duncan in very specific ways, except that Paul never made very much money. And as Foster states in his biography, "making money is the nucleus, the very heart of the American Dream, the radius point of your life from which all other points are measured."
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Date Issued: 2009
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0253
Format: Thesis

Title: The Lone Ranger Dines Again.
Creator: Wylder, Elizabeth, Kirby, David, Kimbrell, James, Belieu, Erin, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This collection of poems, The Lone Ranger Dines Again, is divided into three sections: "Million Dollar Wallpaper," a series of miscellaneous poems ranging in topic from a Colombian drug lord to instructions for playing baseball like a girl; "Six Gun's Legacy," a series of poems centered on childhood; and "The Return of the Convict," a series of poems concerning adulthood in its clumsy infancy. The titles of these sections are derived from episodes of The Lone Ranger television program. The...
Show moreThis collection of poems, The Lone Ranger Dines Again, is divided into three sections: "Million Dollar Wallpaper," a series of miscellaneous poems ranging in topic from a Colombian drug lord to instructions for playing baseball like a girl; "Six Gun's Legacy," a series of poems centered on childhood; and "The Return of the Convict," a series of poems concerning adulthood in its clumsy infancy. The titles of these sections are derived from episodes of The Lone Ranger television program. The goal of The Lone Ranger Dines Again is to mix pop culture, personal experience, and wry observation of everyday life into a frothy, rhythmic, and accessible concoction
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0690
Format: Thesis

Title: What Is Visible.
Creator: Elkins, Kimberly, Butler, Robert Olen, Winegardner, Mark, Burroway, Janet, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: My theis is a collection of five stories, centered around the eponymous "What Is Visible," which title speaks for all of the work. Three are modern, hyperurban tales; one is set in 1850, and another is a road story.
Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0576
Format: Thesis

Title: Sacred Unions: Catharine Sedgwick, Maria Edgeworth, and Domestic-Political Fiction.
Creator: Elmore, Jenifer Lynn, Moore, Dennis, Hadden, Sally, Walker, Eric, Burke, Helen, Haywood, Chanta, Stern, Julia, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Since the 1980s, literary scholars in the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. have recovered the contributions of the nineteenth-century American writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick and her older Anglo-Irish contemporary Maria Edgeworth, establishing both as groundbreaking contributors to their respective national literatures. This dissertation casts new light on both authors by examining their private writings to reconstruct their actual historical relationship to one another and by interpreting their...
Show moreSince the 1980s, literary scholars in the U.K., Ireland, and the U.S. have recovered the contributions of the nineteenth-century American writer Catharine Maria Sedgwick and her older Anglo-Irish contemporary Maria Edgeworth, establishing both as groundbreaking contributors to their respective national literatures. This dissertation casts new light on both authors by examining their private writings to reconstruct their actual historical relationship to one another and by interpreting their published works in a transatlantic and post-colonial context. Reading their works side by side reveals that both authors were preoccupied with modeling Union—the harmonious union of qualities within the individual, of husbands and wives, of disparate groups within larger societies, and, most importantly, of member states within larger political nations, such as Edgeworth's United Kingdom of England, Scotland, and Ireland, and Sedgwick's young United States of America. Though Sedgwick and Edgeworth lived an ocean apart and never met in person, their literary celebrity and shared literary project connected them. Throughout her career, Sedgwick's readers and critics compared her style, her subject matter, her literary and social mission, and indeed the totality of her literary persona to that of Edgeworth. The dedication of Sedgwick's first novel, A New-England Tale (1822), is an encomium to Edgeworth that establishes how much the novice American admired this mature writer who had already achieved enormous transatlantic literary stature. Edgeworth's response to that dedication initiated an occasional correspondence between the two women, and Sedgwick continued to inscribe her fiction with intertextual references to Edgeworth. Important points of intersection between Sedgwick's and Edgeworth's oeuvres include their literary treatments of women and their writings about women writers, their pioneering literary regionalism, their fictional representations of socioeconomic and ethnic others, and their use of allegory to infuse domestic fictions with national political significance. Both writers employ various narrative strategies in presenting the many aspects of their social and political philosophies to the public in a fictional and often coded form that this dissertation theorizes as the sub-genre of domestic-political fiction. This sub-genre was the means through which both authors modeled their ideals of perfect Union.
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Date Issued: 2002
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0568
Format: Thesis

Title: "The Nature of the Search": Popular Culture and Intellectual Identity in the Work of Walker Percy.
Creator: Dominy, Jordan J., Epstein, Andrew, Dickson-Carr, Darryl, Edwards, Leigh, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In this thesis, I argue that the works of Walker Percy present a progression from passive to active attitudes toward popular and mass culture and that understanding this progression brings a new perspective to the relationship between intellectuals and popular culture in mid-to-late-twentieth century American literature. I discuss two of Percy's novels, The Moviegoer and Lancelot, and a book of non-fiction satire and parody, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. The first chapter...
Show moreIn this thesis, I argue that the works of Walker Percy present a progression from passive to active attitudes toward popular and mass culture and that understanding this progression brings a new perspective to the relationship between intellectuals and popular culture in mid-to-late-twentieth century American literature. I discuss two of Percy's novels, The Moviegoer and Lancelot, and a book of non-fiction satire and parody, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book. The first chapter addresses The Moviegoer. In it, I argue that its protagonist, Binx Bolling, deals with the encroaching mass culture of American suburbia of the 1950's by combining the best of both his high and low culture identities into a midcult one, a term defined by Andrew Ross and originally discussed by Dwight MacDonald, a contemporary of Percy. The novel's mere promise of happiness at it's conclusion reflects an ambivalent attitude toward popular culture and the midcult on Percy's part. The second chapter explores the ways in which Lance Lamar, the protagonist of Lancelot, violently subverts popular culture's media by videotaping his wife's acts of infidelity and murdering her lover. I also relate Andrew Ross's discussion of pornography's proliferation in mass media in the late 1960's and 1970's and the implications it has for Lance's anger towards the film company filming an all-but pornographic film at his ancestral home. Lance's violent reactions certainly reflect a changing attitude for Percy, who is more wary of the open sexuality in popular culture, but certainly does not advocate the violent revolution that his protagonist does. The final chapter reflects yet another change in Percy's attitude towards popular culture with Lost in the Cosmos. Rather than choosing fiction, he addresses his concerns with his own voice, albeit with parody, caricature, and satire. But beyond ridiculing popular culture, he recognizes the ways in which intellectuals are susceptible to its influence as well and how this makes the existence of Andrew Ross's "new intellectual" who can speak to both the academic and popular sphere a near impossibility. Ultimately, the resolution of the conflict between intellectuals and popular culture lies with individuals.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0718
Format: Thesis

Title: The Heart of Another Is a Dark Forest.
Creator: Steingass, Brook R., Butler, Robert Olen, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Suarez, Virgil, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Nine short stories.
Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0379
Format: Thesis

Title: The Shambling.
Creator: Snodgrass, James Robert, Kirby, David, Marincola, John, Belieu, Erin, Treharne, Elaine, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The Shambling is a collection of poems that centers around the American cinematic image of the zombie, a creature brought back from the dead and bent on consuming the flesh of the living. Unlike the ghost who returns from the dead in order to right some wrong, the zombie returns from the dead without a reason and can not be stopped. Unlike the ghost, the zombie is corporeal and its threat is not to the individual or to a closed group, but to all of civilization. The zombie haunts me because...
Show moreThe Shambling is a collection of poems that centers around the American cinematic image of the zombie, a creature brought back from the dead and bent on consuming the flesh of the living. Unlike the ghost who returns from the dead in order to right some wrong, the zombie returns from the dead without a reason and can not be stopped. Unlike the ghost, the zombie is corporeal and its threat is not to the individual or to a closed group, but to all of civilization. The zombie haunts me because it is without origin and it seeks no conclusion. Thus zombie as an image and a mythology is open for exploration. Because the zombie is a dark image, I use it as a mode of psychological reaction, a reaction against literary expectation, as a reaction against poetic propriety and as an idea of social limitation which manifests as subconscious longing for the destruction of society. Some of the poems are cinematic and concretely narrative. These seek to explore the social aspects of the zombie. Their themes are personal and post-apocalyptic, toying with the idea of physical deterioration as metaphor for the deterioration of concreteness in poetry and as an expectation of how poetry ought to function, i.e. concretely. Other poems have more energy, anxiety and movement. These poems move away from the concrete by allowing more linguistic possibility to intrude beyond meaning. With this deterioration of meaning I hope to suggest or reflect some kind of mental decay as a kind of metaphor for mindlessness. These poems can be thought of as being invested with the kind of sickness that causes human beings to turn in to zombies. They also seek to represent the deterioration of sense as a metaphor for the descent into zombie-like mindlessness. These poems are those in which the impulse toward sense is most dissolved. These poems are in homage to Paul Celan, and thus are the furthest from clearly making sense. They blur the distinction between sickness and wellness as an exploration of the gap between meaning and language, between concreteness and abstraction. Finally, the whole text is broken up by short, narrow poems I call teeth and which are titled as different kinds of teeth. These poems are designed to be interludes between the larger body of the book which allow the reader to masticate on the possibilities of what he has read. Teeth are a recurrent theme of the book and one which represents the bridge and terminus, the junction between all the possibilities of the book, living and dead, zombie and non-zombie, language and meaning, the spoken, the silent and the eaten.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0374
Format: Thesis

Title: Sacred Ground: A Novel.
Creator: Steinbrink, Jack, Butler, Robert Olen, Jumonville, Neil, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Epstein, Andrew, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Cole Fortan, the narrator of my novel, is a character who hates himself. He's dropped out of college at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater to be the friendly, neighborhood marijuana dealer, the guy all the kids at Eskimo Joe's go to when they want to get stoned for the weekend. But he doesn't want to be that guy anymore. The truth is that Cole has been lost for a long time, and when we meet him he's drifted extraordinarily close to getting into big time trouble with the law. Cole's...
Show moreCole Fortan, the narrator of my novel, is a character who hates himself. He's dropped out of college at Oklahoma State University in Stillwater to be the friendly, neighborhood marijuana dealer, the guy all the kids at Eskimo Joe's go to when they want to get stoned for the weekend. But he doesn't want to be that guy anymore. The truth is that Cole has been lost for a long time, and when we meet him he's drifted extraordinarily close to getting into big time trouble with the law. Cole's suppliers are under investigation and about to go down, and so is Cole. But things are more complicated than that. There's a girl he cares about (Laura), and friends he's known for a long time. Cole makes a decision to leave Oklahoma after his Christmas experience, where he lies to his grandmother about his current occupation. He gives the remainder of his stash to his friend Kyle and narrowly avoids some law enforcement types who are looking for him. From there, Cole is on the road with Florida as his destination. He is going East, and he thinks about his grandfather, who tried to stick out the Dust Bowl in Depression-era Oklahoma, but eventually had to go West to Washington, if only for a little while. In alternating chapters, Cole tells his own story, as well as the story of his grandfather (and eventually, grandmother), starting in the Dust Bowl era and moving up to the contemporary post-9/11 moment.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0380
Format: Thesis

Title: Sylvester H. Scovel, Journalist, and the Spanish-American War.
Creator: Andreu, Darien Elizabeth, McElrath, Joseph R., Rehder, Ernest, Bickley, R. Bruce, Fenstermaker, John, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Sylvester Henry "Harry" Scovel (1869-1905) was one of the most celebrated journalists of the Spanish-American War. Almost every scholar who has written about the correspondents of this late nineteenth-century engagement has made use of Scovel's dispatches from the New York World, particularly his on-the-scene reports of the explosion of the Maine. For the first time, all of Scovel's "war" writing for the Joseph Pulitzer owned New York World are here made available in edited form: 132...
Show moreSylvester Henry "Harry" Scovel (1869-1905) was one of the most celebrated journalists of the Spanish-American War. Almost every scholar who has written about the correspondents of this late nineteenth-century engagement has made use of Scovel's dispatches from the New York World, particularly his on-the-scene reports of the explosion of the Maine. For the first time, all of Scovel's "war" writing for the Joseph Pulitzer owned New York World are here made available in edited form: 132 dispatches dating from the explosion of the Maine on February 15, 1898, to his letter of August 10, 1898, an explanation and apology for the events surrounding his confrontation with General Shafter at the flag-raising ceremony in Santiago. Following an introduction treating the correspondent's life and experiences during the war is a transcription of each article, which has been given a close proofreading and then edited to reflect the discernible intentions of the author within the conventions of contemporaneous usage. The arrangement is chronological, and an "Editorial Methodology" explains how and why these articles are edited as they appear.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0008
Format: Thesis

Title: Living on the Hyphen: The Literature of the Early Arab-Americans Between 1870-1940.
Creator: Al-Issa, Fadi Ahmad, Goodman, Robin, Shinn, Christopher, Vitkus, Daniel, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In this thesis, I focus on the early from 1870 to 1940. I confirm that they did try to preserve their ethnic identity through language by applying Benedict Anderson's theory "imagined communities." In the first chapter, I explain the first encounters between the American and the Arab cultures and the influences of the Protestant missionaries in the Arab countries. In the second chapter, I discuss the issue of Arab-American literature and how it reflected the experiences and turmoil of the...
Show moreIn this thesis, I focus on the early from 1870 to 1940. I confirm that they did try to preserve their ethnic identity through language by applying Benedict Anderson's theory "imagined communities." In the first chapter, I explain the first encounters between the American and the Arab cultures and the influences of the Protestant missionaries in the Arab countries. In the second chapter, I discuss the issue of Arab-American literature and how it reflected the experiences and turmoil of the early Arab immigrants. In the third chapter I apply Andersons' concept of "imagined communities" to the Arab-American ethnicity.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0003
Format: Thesis

Title: Like a Tree on Its Side.
Creator: Kantrowitz, Dana, Stuckey-French, Ned, Gardner, Joann, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis is a collection of lyric poetry and personal essays. The two genres are spliced together in a design intended to use their visual differences and contextual similarities to more fully understand the people, places, and events examined here. The material is based on the author's personal experiences, but is reflected upon and shared in this form in hopes of highlighting the universality of human emotions. Thematically, it delves into the complexities of personal relationships...
Show moreThis thesis is a collection of lyric poetry and personal essays. The two genres are spliced together in a design intended to use their visual differences and contextual similarities to more fully understand the people, places, and events examined here. The material is based on the author's personal experiences, but is reflected upon and shared in this form in hopes of highlighting the universality of human emotions. Thematically, it delves into the complexities of personal relationships—family dynamics, romantic interests, and one's knowledge of herself—and explores how they change over time.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0022
Format: Thesis

Title: The Fantasy of Victorian Cross-Dressing.
Creator: Abbott, Stacey G., Faulk, Barry, Fenstermaker, John, Hawkins, Hunt, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis discusses the manner in which imperialism affected race, gender, and class in Victorian England. In Victorian literature, the different periods of imperialism are evident within the literature—early imperialism literature shows how the English were aware of imperialism, but also how it was considered to be an issue usually outside of England, and New imperialism literature shows how England became extremely involved in world affairs. The two stages also exhibit varying degrees of...
Show moreThis thesis discusses the manner in which imperialism affected race, gender, and class in Victorian England. In Victorian literature, the different periods of imperialism are evident within the literature—early imperialism literature shows how the English were aware of imperialism, but also how it was considered to be an issue usually outside of England, and New imperialism literature shows how England became extremely involved in world affairs. The two stages also exhibit varying degrees of imperialism and conquering both inside the country of England and outside. In order to cope with this issue, many people cross-dressed (dressed, thought, or behaved) in a manner that was not consistent with their own gender, class, or race. Using theory from Anne McClintock as a springboard, I link global imperialism to the internal need within England to control its own people. I trace this phenomenon through early imperialism works Gaskell's Mary Barton, Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Dickens's Great Expectations, and New imperialism works Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and several of Doyle's Sherlock Holmes mysteries.
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Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0012
Format: Thesis

Title: Perp.
Creator: Dennis, Robert Thomas, Kimbrell, James, Kirby, David, Epstein, Andrew, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In the following paragraphs I shall attempt to deliver a mini-poetics, or at the very least, try to clarify the main components of my thought process when writing these poems. This is dangerous territory. It's all too easy to employ abstract and quasi-religious phrases when talking about something as seemingly ineffable as the process of literary creation; I shall endeavor to avoid doing so wherever possible. Please feel free to overlook those places where I fail. TENSION The concept of...
Show moreIn the following paragraphs I shall attempt to deliver a mini-poetics, or at the very least, try to clarify the main components of my thought process when writing these poems. This is dangerous territory. It's all too easy to employ abstract and quasi-religious phrases when talking about something as seemingly ineffable as the process of literary creation; I shall endeavor to avoid doing so wherever possible. Please feel free to overlook those places where I fail. TENSION The concept of tension is central to how I approach writing poems. I may begin with a line or a vague idea of the subject matter, but as I write, it is tension that creates the poem. A former teacher once argued—correctly, I think—that language generates insight. If we agree that insight is a component "good" poetry, then it would follow that one needs first to generate language. This is where I start. I may begin a poem with a line that's been rattling around in my head, but in order to generate language, I first generate tension. I accomplish this on the level of the line. The method I employ most frequently to generate tension is a perhaps obsessive-compulsive attention to line length. I try to make each line in a poem or section approximately the same length. This generates tension by forcing me to carefully consider my words—if a line's too long, I obviously need a shorter word, and vice versa. This attention to line length goes hand-in-hand with an attention to line breaks. Of the latter, I have no special ideas, just the general mandates I believe most poets try to follow—don't break lines on weak words, make the breaks work with the rhythms of the poem, etc. On occasion, I break a line in what I hope is a clever way (cf. the sixth stanza of "From nowhere with love"), but these instances are few and far between. Another way I generate tension is through the use of non-accentual syllabics. "Last Sighs of the Dog" is an example of this—each line has ten syllables. "The North Shore" is another—the syllabic pattern of the first section is mimicked throughout the rest of the poem. The tension the syllabics create has the same effect as an attention to line length—again forcing me to consider more closely my words. The poems here that are non-syllabic and have lines of irregular length either began as one of the two or I just didn't see the necessity for such tension. Sometimes the tension comes built-in. Sometimes the language comes out of my head in prepackaged high-pressure form. But then again, sometimes it does not. It's quite likely that a few of these poems are loose, baggy monsters. THE IDEA It seems the greatest of follies to begin a poem with an idea in mind. A vague one is okay. A nebulous notion even better. But a full-fledged idea is certain death. When one sits down to write a poem about X, then it becomes very difficult to deviate from X—one is committed to making X work (like being in a bad relationship) and spends too much time and effort trying to make X happy. It's better, I think, to make the poem happy (which, in the end, is really the same as making yourself happy). I've tried in this collection to avoid beginning with ideas. The ideas will crop up on their own. Or, as I've written in "Think about beans": subjects have a way of arranging themselves. And anyway, one's intentions in a poem are often very different from what readers will find there. Vladimir Nabokov put it best. In his introduction to Bend Sinister he wrote that "well-wishers [would] bring their own symbols and mobiles, and portable radios, to [his] little party." One will see that I have shamelessly imported this quote in the first "Rorschach" poem in the "Psychological Evaluation" section. One place in this collection where I think there's the stain of a pre-poem idea is in the last section of the title poem. I had settled on titling the collection "Perp" before I had written the poem in which "perp" would appear. I wanted this piece of jargon ripped from the annals of Law & Order to suggest the secret vocabularies that develop in relationships, the inevitability of closure, and the notion that our missteps in life (which most good stories are about) can be seen as criminal behaviors—all very lofty and ambitious, yes, but perhaps the jury's still out on whether or not I've somehow managed to make it work. SOME THINGS YOU MIGHT WANT KNOW ABOUT THE POEMS "Perp," the title poem, is broken into eight sections. Odd numbered sections run forward in time, even numbered sections backward. This may all be a bit confusing, but I couldn't bring myself to follow a more traditionally chronological structure. "Think about beans," takes Herbert Morris's "Ultimate Poem" as inspiration. "Echolalia Frustrata" is a parody, to the syllable, of D.A. Powell's "[darling can you kill me: with your mickeymouse pillows]". The last stanza of "Alas—" blatantly, and perhaps criminally, rips off a passage from J.D. Salinger's Seymour: An Introduction.
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Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0069
Format: Thesis

Title: Moving Toward Stasis: The Desirability of a Rhetoric Revival in Contemporary American Legal Training.
Creator: Canup, Jeffrey A., Poster, Carol, Cooper, Mark, Bickley, Bruce, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This work evaluates and compares the ancient rhetorical method and the modern case method of legal training. Further, it diagnoses an apparent problem with the modern method: lawyers are graduating from law schools without an understanding of the fundamental principles of argumentation. In advocating for a return to the rhetorical method, I propose that modern legal institutions abandon their inductive teaching methods and revive the deductive methods of old. This work explains how forensic...
Show moreThis work evaluates and compares the ancient rhetorical method and the modern case method of legal training. Further, it diagnoses an apparent problem with the modern method: lawyers are graduating from law schools without an understanding of the fundamental principles of argumentation. In advocating for a return to the rhetorical method, I propose that modern legal institutions abandon their inductive teaching methods and revive the deductive methods of old. This work explains how forensic rhetoric (courtroom oratory) is most useful to law students. Ultimately, this work achieves its goals in three ways: (1) by analyzing the historical relationship between ancient rhetoric and law, (2) by discussing specific heuristics ancient rhetorical/legal educators used to prepare students, specifically stasis theory and declamatio; and (3) by analyzing the methods and texts modern institutions use and offering ways to implement the return to a deductive and rhetorically based legal education.
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Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0092
Format: Thesis

Title: The Body of Writing: An Erotics of Language in Contemporary American Fiction.
Creator: Chevailier, Flore, Berry, R.M., Cazé, Antoine, Weingarden, Lauren, Duplay, Mathieu, Epstein, Andrew, Gontarski, S.E., Happe, François, Maniez, Claire, Department of English,...
Show moreChevailier, Flore, Berry, R.M., Cazé, Antoine, Weingarden, Lauren, Duplay, Mathieu, Epstein, Andrew, Gontarski, S.E., Happe, François, Maniez, Claire, Department of English, Florida State University
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Abstract/Description: This study proposes a new interpretive apparatus to examine readers' experience of sensuality in their engagement with the language of fiction. Postmodern texts explore literature's ability to signify and materialize experiences, mediating the physical conditions of everyday existence with the physical conditions of reading and writing. In this exploration, avant-garde writers disrupt traditional signifying techniques, emphasizing the materiality of the medium of their texts—print, sound,...
Show moreThis study proposes a new interpretive apparatus to examine readers' experience of sensuality in their engagement with the language of fiction. Postmodern texts explore literature's ability to signify and materialize experiences, mediating the physical conditions of everyday existence with the physical conditions of reading and writing. In this exploration, avant-garde writers disrupt traditional signifying techniques, emphasizing the materiality of the medium of their texts—print, sound, page, orthography, syntax, etc. This disruption provokes an erotic examination of language and encourages a bodily relationship with the textual medium. I investigate this mode of writing and its political consequences in Joseph McElroy's Plus (1977), Carol Maso's AVA (1993), Theresa Hak Kyung Cha's DICTEE (1982), and Steve Tomasula and Stephen Farrell's VAS (2002), as they produce examples of both thematic and structural erotics through visual experiments, metaphors, or allegorical representations of theoretical connections between pleasure and language. Informed by feminist theorists Julia Kristeva and Hélène Cixous, film critic Laura Marks, philosopher Georges Bataille, art historian Georges Didi-Huberman, and the writings on avant-garde literature by Roland Barthes, this study clarifies American experimental literature's ability to counterbalance and demystify contemporary rhetorical apparatuses that foster conservative political agendas. This project thus repositions postmodern texts as feminist practices that call for a political reevaluation of social systems which confine fictional examinations of the body, and their interpretations, to patriarchal paradigms.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0051
Format: Thesis

Title: Second Sight: Re-Imaging the Optic Regime in Behn's, Southerne's, Smith's, and Mackenzie's Colonial Texts of the Long Eighteenth Century.
Creator: Campbell, Megan L., Burke, Helen, Kim, Eundok, Faulk, Barry, Ward, Candace, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Since the earliest records of culture, mankind has represented its ocularcentric focus through images of sight. Freud theorizes that these images of viewership represent dynamics of power: those who see, actively control, and those who are seen, passively wait to be acted upon. In the archetypes of Western culture, these visual dynamics follow a gendered binary—active/masculine versus passive/feminine. Freud believes that these visual behaviors are determined during the psychosexual stages of...
Show moreSince the earliest records of culture, mankind has represented its ocularcentric focus through images of sight. Freud theorizes that these images of viewership represent dynamics of power: those who see, actively control, and those who are seen, passively wait to be acted upon. In the archetypes of Western culture, these visual dynamics follow a gendered binary—active/masculine versus passive/feminine. Freud believes that these visual behaviors are determined during the psychosexual stages of development, and these roles are then reinforced through cultural norms. Freudian theory stood as the accepted model of behavioral analysis until late into the twentieth century when feminist theorists like Luce Irigaray, Laura Mulvey, and Ann E. Kaplan began examining and deconstructing patriarchal beliefs about visuality. These theorists agree that women can assume the masculine position of visuality and co-opt the active position of sight for themselves. This particular assumption of power can be seen in women's colonial narratives of the eighteenth century, where European women were vested with power over colonial subjects, native men and women alike. In an interesting duality, European women simultaneously inhabited the object position of passivity vis-à-vis their male colonizer counterpart and the subject position of activity vis-à-vis the colonial Other. This multi-dimensional position allowed for identificatory bonds across gender and racial lines and resulted in contradictory images of spectatorship within women's colonial narratives. This study examines the spectatorship imagery in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, Thomas Southerne's Oroonoko, Charlotte Smith's Desmond and The Wanderings of Warwick, and Anna Maria Mackenzie's Slavery, or the Times to account for the shifts in loyalty and explain the situational alliances that women forged both with their countrymen, viewing the Other as inferior and sub-human, and with the colonized, viewing them as subjects in their own right, as their equals.
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Date Issued: 2009
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0100
Format: Thesis

Title: Building Four-Hundred.
Creator: Wienbrot, Joel M., Winegardner, Mark, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Berry, R. M., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: My thesis is a collection of five stories. The title story is a formally experimental piece designed to supply a choice of reading strategies.
Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0050
Format: Thesis

Title: The Architecture of Sex.
Creator: Allin, Nicholas, Kirby, David, Epstein, Andrew, Hamby, Barbara, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This is a collection of poems.
Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0174
Format: Thesis

Title: Southern Boys.
Creator: Gerrity, Margaret L., Butler, Robert Olen, Bishop, Wendy, Kirby, David, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Mia Carpenter has spent most of her adult life avoiding her father and resenting him for running out on their family when she was twelve. Now approaching her thirtieth birthday, Mia once again fears she's being left behind by a man she loves, her husband Tim, who has been working as a news anchor for Channel 38 in Gulf Point, Florida, and confesses he's been unfaithful to her during their summer apart. Determined not to let Tim get away as her father did, Mia moves to Gulf Point and tries to...
Show moreMia Carpenter has spent most of her adult life avoiding her father and resenting him for running out on their family when she was twelve. Now approaching her thirtieth birthday, Mia once again fears she's being left behind by a man she loves, her husband Tim, who has been working as a news anchor for Channel 38 in Gulf Point, Florida, and confesses he's been unfaithful to her during their summer apart. Determined not to let Tim get away as her father did, Mia moves to Gulf Point and tries to put her marriage back together. Standing in her way are her brother Danny, whose cynicism and attention to detail unnerve her; her father Owen, who arrives in Gulf Point unannounced and admits he's recovering from a heart attack neither of his children knew about; and Tim himself, who uses work as an excuse to avoid having to talk about their problems. Southern Boys examines how our families shape us. Mia learns that in order to make amends with Tim, she must first accept her father's misdeeds and forgive him for always seeming more like a buddy than a parent. She must see how Danny acts and figure out how to avoid his cynicism. Most importantly, Mia must realize how she blames others and drives them away because she hangs on to a past that cannot exist anymore.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0141
Format: Thesis

Title: Conversations with Ray Bradbury.
Creator: Aggelis, Steven Louis, Bickley, R. Bruce, Sandon, Leo, Lhamon, William T., McElrath, Joseph, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Conversations with Ray Bradbury, edited by Steven Aggelis and published by the University Press of Mississippi in Spring 2004, is a collection of Ray Bradbury interviews from 1948 to 2002, with the last of these interviews being conducted by the editor. Besides the interviews, the university Press of Mississippi collection contains an introduction, chronology, and index. This dissertation includes and supplements the published work. Although the interviews in the published collection appear...
Show moreConversations with Ray Bradbury, edited by Steven Aggelis and published by the University Press of Mississippi in Spring 2004, is a collection of Ray Bradbury interviews from 1948 to 2002, with the last of these interviews being conducted by the editor. Besides the interviews, the university Press of Mississippi collection contains an introduction, chronology, and index. This dissertation includes and supplements the published work. Although the interviews in the published collection appear in the hard-copy of the dissertation, along with other interviews not in the University Press of Mississippi collection, they are excluded from the electronic copy, due to copyright restrictions. However, the electronic version does contain the following additional dissertation material: the unabridged introduction; chronology; two Bradbury interviews by Steven Aggelis, including the published interview and one not previously released; an annotated bibliography of published interviews with Ray Bradbury that consists of interviews selected for the collection as well as entries and excerpts from others not chosen; and an exhaustive bibliography of Bradbury primary and secondary sources, i.e., works by and about the author and his writings. The interviews reveal Bradbury's recurring interest in science, an appeal to and reliance on emotion versus reason, censorship and tyranny, urban planning, comics and cartoons, death, education, Hollywood, love or passion as a creative force, magic, outer space, morality, myth, philosophy, politics, psychology, racial relations, technology, sex, the economy, the future, the horror genre, films, the media, the use of metaphor, war, writing and writers, religion, and more.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0001
Format: Thesis

Title: The Wheels of Heaven.
Creator: Armstrong, Stephen Blodgett, Suarez, Virgil, Rehder, Ernest, Teague, Deborah Coxwell, Fowler, Douglas, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The Wheels of Heaven, a noir fable, chronicles the adventures of a man after he loses the one thing he cares about most, his wife. Combining the determinism of a Fritz Lang movie with the revenge themes found in samurai stories, it affirms the idea that good prevails. Sooner or later, no matter the odds, good always prevails.
Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0032
Format: Thesis

Title: Remembering to Forget: The Event of Memory in Beckett and Joyce.
Creator: Anderson, Dustin, Gontarksi, S.E., Carbonell, Joyce L., Faulk, Barry, Berry, R.M., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This project is an attempt to re-conceptualizes the interaction between memory and the body, specifically the failures and slippages of memory, in the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. I contend that Beckett's work (following Joyce's examples) explores the moment of interaction between the cognitive mind and the corporeal body as memories become actions—or fail to become actions. I examine moments of memory failure or slippage in light of cognitive science developed by...
Show moreThis project is an attempt to re-conceptualizes the interaction between memory and the body, specifically the failures and slippages of memory, in the works of James Joyce and Samuel Beckett. I contend that Beckett's work (following Joyce's examples) explores the moment of interaction between the cognitive mind and the corporeal body as memories become actions—or fail to become actions. I examine moments of memory failure or slippage in light of cognitive science developed by neurophilosophers (from Bergson to recent works by Pinker, Kandel, Ramachandran and Damásio) to discuss how these types of memory-events work in studies of phantom limbs and bodies, neuro and physical memory mapping, and in neuropathies as they materialize in language. To that end, this project takes a two-fold approach: first, to examine how the work on memory that Bergson theorized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries is reflected artistically by looking at two texts (Finnegans Wake and Murphy) that develop approaches to memory and cognition similar to Bergson's own, and, second, to examine how cognitive science has finally caught up with the modernist writing that anticipated much of what contemporary neurophilosophers are studying now. Chapter one discusses development of cognitive science and its disavowal of its foundation in Bergson's late nineteenth & early twentieth century work in Time and Free Will, Matter and Memory, The Creative Mind, and Creative Evolution. The second chapter then develops a comparative analysis of those current trends and practices in cognitive science, specifically those related to perception, as well as the artistic cognitive projects that Joyce and Beckett develop that are strikingly similar to those that Bergson pioneered in the late nineteenth century. The third chapter deals with Joyce's Finnegans Wake as an attempt to remember and the failure inherent in that process. However, since the design of Finnegans Wake is a model of actual cognition (circuitous and simultaneous rather than sequential), the attempts to remember always imply the process of forgetting. The event of memory in Joyce functions in two ways, first as an inaccessible initial memory but also as a transmutive shift into a new form of memory. This chapter works backwards from the resulting memories to find the triggering memory-event. Chapter four develops a reading of the set-piece of the Murphy's mind which is informed by both Bergson's own development of cognitive zones (based on his reading of Leibniz's monadic model) and Joyce's development of the monad into a dyad in Finnegans Wake. The third and fourth chapters form discussions of where Joyce ends his study on memory and Beckett begins his study (respectively). The conclusion points to where we might look to develop the discussion further by looking at Watt briefly.
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Date Issued: 2010
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0210
Format: Thesis

Title: Online Composition Classes Call for a Pedagogical Paradigm Shift: Students as Cartographers of Their Own Knowledge Maps.
Creator: Ashman, Kathleen, Coxwell-Teague, Deborah, Fenstermaker, John, Rehder, Ernest, Bickley, Bruce, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: My dissertation research focuses on how students create knowledge in a classroom community, more specifically how taking an online course impacts students' learning and ultimately, students' knowledge making. Since the online course presents a closed community, the Blackboard site is the only "learning site" for the students in the course. Since I am researching online Bb communities, the context of the research invites ethnographical methods, both qualitative data or narratives to describe...
Show moreMy dissertation research focuses on how students create knowledge in a classroom community, more specifically how taking an online course impacts students' learning and ultimately, students' knowledge making. Since the online course presents a closed community, the Blackboard site is the only "learning site" for the students in the course. Since I am researching online Bb communities, the context of the research invites ethnographical methods, both qualitative data or narratives to describe each online community's "health" and quantitative analysis of the student dialogue threads on the forums. This ethnographic study focuses on the impact of pedagogical styles on the learning processes of online composition students. In the spring semester of 2005, I observed two Blackboard online course sites: one taught as a teacher-centered course and one taught as a student-centered course. I researched the archived course sites looking for evidence of positive communal health in the communication exchanges between student and student, as well as between student and instructor. I also analyzed the discussion board forums for evidence of transformative learning in the student dialogues. This dissertation study compares the pedagogical strategies of teacher-centered and student-centered online courses, reflects the impact of communal health on the online course community, sheds light on how communal health influences the student's ability to move through the transformative learning process, as well as poses questions for further research.
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Date Issued: 2006
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0244
Format: Thesis

Title: In the Land of Galilee.
Creator: Assadi, Ginger R., Suarez, Virgil, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Cooper, Mark, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This is a collection of stories centering on the lives of the Palestinians living in Deir-Al-Asad, Israel and the United States. Lying With the Saints focuses on the roles of respect and honor within the Arab family. Engagement is about the rituals of courtship and marriage and how the fine the line between love and honor can be. The Boy Who Forgot Arabic deals with identity struggles in post-September 11th America and Guests at the Wedding is about the clash between the close-knit culture of...
Show moreThis is a collection of stories centering on the lives of the Palestinians living in Deir-Al-Asad, Israel and the United States. Lying With the Saints focuses on the roles of respect and honor within the Arab family. Engagement is about the rituals of courtship and marriage and how the fine the line between love and honor can be. The Boy Who Forgot Arabic deals with identity struggles in post-September 11th America and Guests at the Wedding is about the clash between the close-knit culture of the Palestinian family and that of the American way of life. I chose to tell these interconnected pieces as short stories instead of weaving them together as part of a novel because I believe it is reflective of the fragmented lives of the Palestinians living in Israel. They are not fully accepted in the country of their citizenship – Israel – and they are not fully accepted by the Palestinians living in the West Bank and Gaza Strip. These "Arabs of '48," as they are called, are caught between worlds and cultures from the moment they are born. They are second-class citizens of Israel, but even so, they enjoy a higher standard of living than the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza. Neither side fully trusts them and they often feel the tug from both sides, creating a natural division of loyalties. Their voices often go unheard, but their needs and status will need to be addressed in any serious negotiations between Palestine and Israel. The late Edward Said often wrote about the fragmented narrative style in modern Palestinian fiction. For Said, Emile Habibi's novel, Said the Pessoptomist, successfully shows the Palestinian experience because it employs a non-linear method of storytelling that reflects the uncertainty of day-to-day life for the Palestinians as a people. (Said) Filmmaker Elia Suleiman also uses this sort of storytelling device in Chronicle of a Disappearance and Divine Intervention. The dramatic leaps in narration and time may be disconcerting to a Westerner, but they are all too familiar to the Palestinians. While I do not take the same liberties in my storytelling as Habibi and Suleiman, I do see their influence in these stories. I see the search for identity that is core to both men's work. The struggle to define oneself is part of the growing process anywhere, but it is especially true for the Palestinians living in Israel.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0247
Format: Thesis

Title: Like a Rolling Stone: Moving Toward Methodologies for Analysis of Multimodal Musical Performance.
Creator: Burgess, Andrew D. (Andrew David), Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Houck, Davis W., Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Neal, Michael R., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences,...
Show moreBurgess, Andrew D. (Andrew David), Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Houck, Davis W., Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Neal, Michael R., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: As a means for understanding a wide range of multimodal phenomena, multimodal analysis poses methodological challenges for the novice researcher intent on investigating multimodal communication, especially communication that involves multimodal musical performance (MMP), an understudied communicative act. As a response to these challenges, this project examines three approaches to multimodal analysis identified by Carey Jewitt in The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis as central to...
Show moreAs a means for understanding a wide range of multimodal phenomena, multimodal analysis poses methodological challenges for the novice researcher intent on investigating multimodal communication, especially communication that involves multimodal musical performance (MMP), an understudied communicative act. As a response to these challenges, this project examines three approaches to multimodal analysis identified by Carey Jewitt in The Routledge Handbook of Multimodal Analysis as central to studying multimodality writ large: social-semiotic multimodal analysis (SSMA), multimodal discourse analysis (MDA), and multimodal interactional analysis (MIA). However, while these approaches each provide a theory and key concepts for analysis, they lack a practicable methodology—necessary for the novice research—and, thus, provide no concrete way to pursue multimodal analysis or to assess the strengths and deficits of a particular approach when applied to the analysis of MMPs. In this project, I conduct a critical analysis that includes a theoretical and pragmatic examination of these approaches to multimodal analysis and assess them for strengths and deficits in terms of a particular MMP because such a performance is an important and under-explored variety of multimodal text. Thus, this project asks three questions of each approach and its methods: 1) What are the strengths of each approach to multimodal analysis of musical performance as multimodal communication? 2) What are the deficits of each approach to multimodal analysis of musical performance as multimodal communication? 3) And, finally, given the strengths and deficits of competing approaches to multimodal analysis of musical performance as multimodal communication, what do we need moving forward in order to fully, robustly, and capaciously analyze and understand musical performance as multimodal communication? I respond to these questions by devising a synthesized, practicable methodology for each approach, one derived from the work in key chapters in The Routledge Handbook identified by Jewitt as employing a specific approach. I apply each of these methodologies to a single musical performance: video footage from Bob Dylan’s July 25, 1965 performance at the Newport Folk Festival—which is often seen as a pivotal moment in popular music history—collected on the 2011 blu-ray release of Murray Lerner’s concert film The Other Side of the Mirror: Bob Dylan Live At Newport Folk Festival 1963-1965. I assess the results of my application of each methodology and its methods to determine the strengths and deficits of each approach for analyzing MMPs. Finally, I offer two options to bolster strengths and address deficits of these three approaches to the multimodal analysis of MMPs, one crafted from combining approaches, and one crafted from a new perspective—that of sonic imaginations (Sterne)—thus informing methodology with attention to the sonic aspects of MMPs. This dissertation offers three key results important for the novice researcher. First, it provides a practicable methodology for each approach, a necessary step in the process of assessing an approach's strengths and deficits. Second, it offers the novice researcher insight into each methodology’s potential. For instance, analyses indicated that SSMA possesses, among its five strengths, a focus on the sign-maker, while at the same time, it possesses, among its three deficits, no mechanism through which to consider the multiple sign-makers involved in an MMP. Similarly, MDA possesses, among its six strengths, a focus on the multimodal phenomenon, while at the same time, it possesses, among its four deficits, a lack of a systematic means for delineating levels of discourse. And, MDA possesses, among its five strengths, a focus on interaction between social actors involved in an MMP, while at the same time, it possesses, among its five deficits, a requirement for a considerable amount of guesswork on the part of the researcher. Third, while demonstrating that no approach to multimodal analysis offers a “best” methodology for the analysis of MMPs, this dissertation offers two directions for methodological inspiration. It concludes that, through a deliberate courting of emotion by tapping into elements of music criticism and through a deliberate courting of messiness by embracing the union of emotion and analysis, methodologies for analysis can be crafted that align with the demands of MMPs.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: FSU_FALL2017_Burgess_fsu_0071E_14194
Format: Thesis

Title: Modernist Empathy in American Litearture: William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright.
Creator: Tabata, Kentaro, Berry, R. M., Wakamiya, Lisa Ryoko, Epstein, Andrew, Kilgore, John Mac, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: In this dissertation that discusses the American novels by William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright, I delineate the concept of modernist empathy as a radical urge for intersubjective immediacy, while adjusting the concept of empathy as each situation requires instead of squeezing various manifestations of empathy into a single, standardized definition. I observe how those writers struggle to represent modernist empathy by differentiating it from its similar psychological...
Show moreIn this dissertation that discusses the American novels by William Faulkner, Nathanael West, and Richard Wright, I delineate the concept of modernist empathy as a radical urge for intersubjective immediacy, while adjusting the concept of empathy as each situation requires instead of squeezing various manifestations of empathy into a single, standardized definition. I observe how those writers struggle to represent modernist empathy by differentiating it from its similar psychological phenomena, especially sympathy. Instead of establishing empathy’s predominance over sympathy, however, I pay detailed attention to the constantly oscillating dynamic between a modernist urge for empathic immediacy and a realistic compromise of sympathetic distancing, thus revealing empathy’s instability and ambiguity. After briefly overviewing Amy Coplan’s conceptualization of empathy and sketching three categories of narrative empathy in the introduction, I have explained the concept of modernist empathy in the first chapter. In doing so, I first examine the discourse that surrounded the concept of empathy at the time, contrasting modernist empathy with its sisterly concept of sympathy. Then, since empathy and sympathy do not always form a clear dichotomy, I have argued that modernist empathy should be captured in the process of the oscillating dynamic between modernist urge for empathy and sympathetic compromise of distancing. In the second chapter, I have discussed how modernist empathy is manifested in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury according to the three categories of narrative empathy. First, I have analyzed the novel’s experimental narrative in terms of readerly empathy. Then, I have discussed the novel’s empathic and anti-empathic characters as manifestations of represented empathy. Finally, I have examined Faulkner’s writerly empathy, and I have observed how he embraces the ultimate instability of modernist empathy. In the third chapter, by considering Nathanael West as a late modernist, I have argued that his novels are critiques of modernist empathy. In the analysis of his first novel, The Dream Life of Balso Snell, I have revealed West’s dichotomy between intellectual distancing and emotional involvement. Then, I have attempted to depict how West dramatizes his protagonists’ failures of empathy in Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust. In the process, I critique Martha Nussbaum’s theory of compassion in relation to empathy. I also consider the relationship of empathy to the advent of the anonymous mass in the 1930s and observed West’s critique of empathy at the age of mass culture. The focus of the final chapter is about the writerly design of the strategic use of empathy in Richard Wright’s Native Son. After reviewing the past literary criticism of the novel’s empathy, I have discussed how the novel is strategized to establish an intimate readerly empathy with Bigger Thomas. At the end of the argument, I examine the author’s strategic design of empathy and its relation to racial politics.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: FSU_FALL2017_Tabata_fsu_0071E_14190
Format: Thesis

Title: From Rubrication to Typography: Die geesten of geschiedenis van Romen and the History of the Book in the Low Countries.
Creator: Gibbons, Jacob, Department of English
Abstract/Description: The development of printing in the fifteenth century did not transform the medieval Book from the manuscript to the modern mass-market paperback overnight—instead, changes in the design of late medieval texts occurred gradually over the first decades of printing in Europe. This has significant repercussions for the way we should evaluate terms like "print culture" and how we understand features of book production traditionally assigned to manuscript or print. To illuminate this transition, I...
Show moreThe development of printing in the fifteenth century did not transform the medieval Book from the manuscript to the modern mass-market paperback overnight—instead, changes in the design of late medieval texts occurred gradually over the first decades of printing in Europe. This has significant repercussions for the way we should evaluate terms like "print culture" and how we understand features of book production traditionally assigned to manuscript or print. To illuminate this transition, I will discuss the changes in the structuring and layout of books at the end of the fifteenth century, with a particular focus on "rubrication," the strategic use of red ink to guide readers' eyes through the pages of the medieval manuscript. Despite the development of printing and its affordances for using font, size, and spatial arrangement of the text to orient the reader, rubrication continued to be used in complex and multivalent ways throughout early printing. A detailed case study of several early print and manuscript editions of the Gesta Romanorum—one of the most popular storybooks of the Late Middle Ages—reveals a gradual transition from the use of rubrication and other visual cues in the medieval manuscript to the spatially-typographically oriented printed book. This transition was characterized by continuity and measured evolution—rather than an abrupt shift to something as concrete as "print culture"—in which the new technology emulated its predecessor as it progressively developed its own identity and made its own imprint on literate society.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0207
Format: Thesis

Title: The "Mysteries" Behind The Adapted Story.
Creator: Wallace, Alexandria, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This creative thesis project focuses on adapting the short story form to short film. My work examines how a particular short story can be adapted into different film genres for different audiences. The project adapts the short story by Elizabeth Tallent entitled, "No One's A Mystery" into four very different scripts: a "faithful" adaptation, a hand-drawn limited-animation children's narrative, a "loose" adaptation, and a music video treatment. In this text, the reader will find some...
Show moreThis creative thesis project focuses on adapting the short story form to short film. My work examines how a particular short story can be adapted into different film genres for different audiences. The project adapts the short story by Elizabeth Tallent entitled, "No One's A Mystery" into four very different scripts: a "faithful" adaptation, a hand-drawn limited-animation children's narrative, a "loose" adaptation, and a music video treatment. In this text, the reader will find some introductory information on adaptation theory and a brief overview of some scholarly debate; followed by the four scripts and analyses for each short film. The major focus of the analyses are on the adaptation process. They will also include each interpretation's relationship to the short story, theory, and how audience and genre affect the process. Two of the four scripts (the children's narrative and music video adaptations) have been filmed and edited together as well to further understand the adaptive mode.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0198
Format: Thesis

Title: Collected Works in Fiction and Nonfiction.
Creator: Scott, Paige, Department of English
Abstract/Description: The pieces included here represent the capstone of my work in undergraduate workshops in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction here at Florida State University. Each piece is wholly unrelated to the others and hopefully shows an experimentation in different styles, from flash fiction to the traditional short story, and from place essay to historical event. Every story was a pure joy to create. "100 Needles" was published in the Summer 2011 edition of Flashquake, an online literary journal for flash...
Show moreThe pieces included here represent the capstone of my work in undergraduate workshops in Fiction and Creative Nonfiction here at Florida State University. Each piece is wholly unrelated to the others and hopefully shows an experimentation in different styles, from flash fiction to the traditional short story, and from place essay to historical event. Every story was a pure joy to create. "100 Needles" was published in the Summer 2011 edition of Flashquake, an online literary journal for flash fiction. This was my first attempt at flash fiction and came to me on the back of a memory of a visit to St. Ives in Cornwall, England in the summer of 2009. St. Ives is a place of old heritage and revival; what was once a fishing village is now a sought after vacation spot for tourists and a haven for artists. During my visit there I began to wonder what had happened to the old villagers and their way of life. "100 Needles" is the result of that speculation, one that combined heritage and art and a longing for old ways. "Drift" began as a voice, that of a man three-quarters cultured and one-quarter redneck, who simply would not leave me until I told his story. Darryl Boulard is also partly inspired by a friend who loves to hunt and will sit in a tree for an entire day, tweeting about the things he sees as he passes his time. This story is still evolving and may eventually be novelized. "Geronimo Slept Here" is a nonfiction place essay that is a reminiscence of my life as a military brat and one who was very connected to the land. The time period is the seventies when a new appreciation for Native Americans was sweeping the nation, perhaps as a result of free-thinking hippies who wanted to get "back to the garden." South Dakota, a land steeped in Native American heritage, specifically the Lakota-Sioux, was a place of whispering winds and unforgiving landscapes. But for a child of eleven, it was an enchanted world in which to live. This essay was a finalist in the Kudzu Review Fall 2011 Contest. The last piece, "A Hanging in Lima", is the true story of the execution of my great uncle (four times removed), Andrew Brentlinger for the murder of his wife, Sarah. It was a story completely unknown to our family until my sister and I ran across it during a research of our family genealogy. Because it was such a shocking event for its time, the event was written up in papers across the U.S. It involved a future President, accusations of torrid behavior, a circus, and a botched hanging. This, I knew, was a story that needed telling in its entirety, and I spent a year collecting information from local Ohio histories and a vast array of newspapers printed in 1871 to 1872.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0192
Format: Thesis

Title: Running Away on Rollerskates.
Creator: Gabor, Diana, Department of English
Abstract/Description: "What do you want to be when you grow up?" Having been asked this question myself, at every stage in life, I find it ironic that not much of fiction deals with this subject. Sure, there's the "coming of age" category, but it seems explicitly reserved for teenagers and young kids losing their innocence. Where does the twenty-something, fresh out of college, with the entire world (really universe) blossoming at their feet, fit? I endeavor to challenge society's view on adolescence. In our...
Show more"What do you want to be when you grow up?" Having been asked this question myself, at every stage in life, I find it ironic that not much of fiction deals with this subject. Sure, there's the "coming of age" category, but it seems explicitly reserved for teenagers and young kids losing their innocence. Where does the twenty-something, fresh out of college, with the entire world (really universe) blossoming at their feet, fit? I endeavor to challenge society's view on adolescence. In our grandparent's days, they had to walk twelve miles in the snow to school, use the card catalog system, etc., etc.. Yet in our days, we must find gravity in a floating world: new technologies are cropping up daily, the government seems more disconnected from its populace, new job markets are opening up, others shutting down, print might die. Modernism began as artists attempted to make sense of the horrors of the world wars and emerging technologies. Post-modernism reacted to it. Where are we today? I feel that now, more than ever, it is valid to say that the average twenty-something is lost. Settling on anything, be it a career or significant other, is more difficult due to globalism and rapid societal changes. For my thesis project, I will be writing a novella about two characters undergoing this "quarter-life" crisis of realizing the rest of their lives is in their hands.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0375
Format: Thesis

Title: Reasons for the Dark to Be Afraid.
Creator: Ruiz, Daniel, Department of English
Abstract/Description: The poems and translations in this thesis explore the "three strong voices" that poet Federico García Lorca believes the artist should heed: "the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art." The sequence of these poems is meant to reflect the poetic speaker's interactions with these voices. Three of the four sections are named after iconic paintings by Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, and the poems in each of these sections indirectly reflect the concepts...
Show moreThe poems and translations in this thesis explore the "three strong voices" that poet Federico García Lorca believes the artist should heed: "the voice of death, with all its foreboding, the voice of love and the voice of art." The sequence of these poems is meant to reflect the poetic speaker's interactions with these voices. Three of the four sections are named after iconic paintings by Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso, and the poems in each of these sections indirectly reflect the concepts these works present in an attempt to create a dialogue between the written and visual arts. The two works by Dali are The Persistence of Memory and The Disintegration of the Persistence of Memory, and the development from the former, which is the second section, to the latter, which is the fourth, is supposed to suggest the interaction between a poet and his or her influences as they work to develop their own unique style, playing at the binary between originality and influence. The title section of the collection is an exploration into the search for truth and originality within this binary—the "irreconcilable feud" between a young artist and a poetic tradition that began thousands of years ago.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0332
Format: Thesis

Title: Gender and Genre: Contextualizing Two Early American Novels.
Creator: Shoemaker, Kahla, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This project focuses on the role of gender in Susanna Rowson's seduction novel Charlotte Temple and Charles Brockden Brown's gothic novel Wieland. Incorporating literary analysis, historical information, and the work of other scholars, I contextualize these two novels within early American life and literature. Through this project, I urge readers to resist reading early American novels as a truthful reflection of the historical situation and encourage analysis that is based in gender...
Show moreThis project focuses on the role of gender in Susanna Rowson's seduction novel Charlotte Temple and Charles Brockden Brown's gothic novel Wieland. Incorporating literary analysis, historical information, and the work of other scholars, I contextualize these two novels within early American life and literature. Through this project, I urge readers to resist reading early American novels as a truthful reflection of the historical situation and encourage analysis that is based in gender criticism, rather than feminist criticism. Through this focus, I explore the progressive and regressive aspects of gender representations in the novels, acknowledging both Charlotte Temple and Wieland as multifaceted in their didacticism.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0245
Format: Thesis

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