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Title: "Can't Knock the Hustle": Hustler Masculinity in African American Culture.
Creator: Garnes, Lamar J. (Lamar Jordan), McGregory, Jerrilyn, Shinn, Christopher, Jones, Maxine, Montgomery, Maxine, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: "Can't Knock the Hustle": Performances of Black Hustler Masculinity in African American Literature and Culture, reinterprets the African American social movements of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, emphasizing how the controversial performances of black men as black hustlers contributed to them. Reading the Black Power movement as a youth-driven reaction not only to the elders in the Civil Rights movement but also to the 1965 Moynihan Report that defined black men in terms of criminal...
Show more"Can't Knock the Hustle": Performances of Black Hustler Masculinity in African American Literature and Culture, reinterprets the African American social movements of the mid-to-late 1960s and early 1970s, emphasizing how the controversial performances of black men as black hustlers contributed to them. Reading the Black Power movement as a youth-driven reaction not only to the elders in the Civil Rights movement but also to the 1965 Moynihan Report that defined black men in terms of criminal deviance, I demonstrate how young black men sought to retain the masculinity, which they felt their elders had been stripped of, by becoming hustlers themselves. This study also claims that the selected texts should be privileged as hustler narratives, drawing attention to the function of the hustler as participating in a wider American tradition of upward class mobility. In the process, the black hustler hyperbolically emulates, criticizes, and rejects or restructures such concepts of individual 'rags-to-riches' capitalism and/or middle class respectability in order to achieve his own status and define his own terms for the construction of alternative black masculinities. Chapter One reconnects the black hustler to the badman, a hero in the African American folk tradition, and interrogates how the federal government and the film industry respectively demonized and commodified it. Chapters Two and Three illustrate how hustler masculinity in Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land and Malcolm X's The Autobiography serves as a social critique of race and class in the inner-city and argue that the (re)establishment of cultural, political, and/or spiritual communities are necessary for black males performers to transcend hustler masculinity. Chapter Four examines Elaine Brown's A Taste of Power and discusses how and to what extent she could lead the Black Panther Party when hustler masculinity plays a large role in the organization and function of relationships in the party. Chapter Five demonstrate how the commodification of the black hustler in the semi- autobiographical and fictional narratives of Iceberg Slim and Donald Goines along with the presentation of the hustler figure in Blaxploitation films contributed its present denigration and sensationalism. The Epilogue addresses how hip hop performers such as Ice Cube, NWA, Nas, Jay-Z, and 50 cent, amongst others, are recovering and recuperating the figure of the black hustler to its representation prior to the early 1970s. Such work is needed because it assists in developing an understanding of how young black men learn to perform masculinity in particular kinds of urban communities and also to complicate how we understand black masculinity in terms of what Michael Eric Dyson called the "politics of respectability."
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Date Issued: 2009
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-4355
Format: Thesis

Title: The "Endless Space Between": Exploring Film's Architectural Spaces, Places, Gender, and Genre.
Creator: Page, Sarah, Department of English
Abstract/Description: Architectural spaces and places within films often work to represent larger themes of the films' stories. This paper explores how films from three different genres, horror, science fiction, and romance, utilize architectural places and space on screen to represent gender. Films explored include Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, Ridley Scott's Alien, and Spike Jonze's Her.
Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0433
Format: Thesis

Title: "Forced on Exertion": Employment and Boredom in Austen's Sense and Sensibility.
Creator: Yaun, Katherine, Walker, Eric, Faulk, Barry, Warren, Nancy, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis examines the employment choices available to single women on a typical 19th-century Georgian estate, represented by Barton Park in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The word "employment" appears more than 65 times in her six novels, with approximately 13 references in Sense and Sensibility. Although "employment" signifies a variety of meanings throughout Austen's work, in this study I analyze the word's significations of a single concept, a concentrated activity contributing to...
Show moreThis thesis examines the employment choices available to single women on a typical 19th-century Georgian estate, represented by Barton Park in Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility. The word "employment" appears more than 65 times in her six novels, with approximately 13 references in Sense and Sensibility. Although "employment" signifies a variety of meanings throughout Austen's work, in this study I analyze the word's significations of a single concept, a concentrated activity contributing to a larger, individually-motivated project. Austen's repeated usage of "employment," coupled with her satiric exposure of Lady Middleton, indicate an underlying consciousness of the tensions associated with the landed gentry's elite status as a leisure class and the culture of boredom that permeated the estate, precluding the normalization of employment. In this work, I focus on a particular slice of the traditional private/public scholarship on 19th century British literature and argue that both male and female estate residents locate themselves in multiple positions along the continuum between boredom and employment. I analyze the characters of Lady Middleton, Elinor and Marianne Dashwood and Edward Ferrars in order to understand the variety of possible cultural responses to this continuum that Austen offers her audience. Sense and Sensibility, Austen's first published novel, tangibly exemplifies an employment choice available to single women of the landed gentry – reading and writing satire – and thus revises the intangible "nothingness" of Lady Middleton's boredom satirized in the novel.
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Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0990
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: "God Help Tristrem the Knight!/He Faught for Ingland": A Narrative and Manuscript Study of English Identity in Sir Tristrem.
Creator: Yaitsky, Lydia, Johnson, David F., Treharne, Elaine, Vitkus, Daniel, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Sir Tristrem is the earliest English versions of the Tristan and Isolde story, and it is the only rendition that presents its protagonist as an English hero. The romance's many markers of Englishness become even more legible in the manuscript context of the poem. With its singular appearance in the Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of Scotland, Advocates' MS.19.2.1 (c.1330), Sir Tristrem and the deeds of its eponymous hero become inscribed in the Matter of England. Because this is the...
Show moreSir Tristrem is the earliest English versions of the Tristan and Isolde story, and it is the only rendition that presents its protagonist as an English hero. The romance's many markers of Englishness become even more legible in the manuscript context of the poem. With its singular appearance in the Auchinleck Manuscript, National Library of Scotland, Advocates' MS.19.2.1 (c.1330), Sir Tristrem and the deeds of its eponymous hero become inscribed in the Matter of England. Because this is the only medieval instance of the poem, this study of national identity in Sir Tristrem must be contextualized within its literary tradition and its manuscript context. When judged against the courtly standards as represented in Thomas' Tristran and Gottfried's Tristan, the Middle English Sir Tristrem pales in comparison. But this comparison assumes that the anonymous Middle English poet was participating in the same courtly narrative tradition as Thomas and Gottfried. In my study of the poem, I argue that the Tristrem poet purposefully rejects the courtly tradition. In reducing the emphasis on emotional responses and focusing instead on land rights and public performance, Sir Tristrem blends the courtly Tristan narratives with the tales of English heroes. Tristrem travels to Ermonie to win back his heritage. In avenging the death of his father, Tristrem behaves like the famous English heroes Havelok, Guy, and Boeve, but his story differs from theirs because of Tristrem's inability to settle down and establish a dynasty. The only way to secure an inheritance is by transmitting it to the next generation. Despite his marriage to Ysonde of the White Hands, Tristrem never fathers any children. His only recourse is to establish a new dynasty, one not related to him by blood: the dynasty of his foster father Rohand and his sons. This argument that Sir Tristrem participates in the English hero tradition finds support in the manuscript evidence of the Auchinleck MS. The manuscript compiler has selected five English hero romances—Guy of Warwick (couplets), Guy of Warwick (stanzas), Reinbroun (the romance of Guy's son), Sir Beues of Hamtoun, and Horn Childe and Maiden Rimnild—and may have selected Sir Tristrem because of its narrative similarities to them. The manuscript context of Sir Tristrem helps its eponymous hero gain recognition as a tragic exiled-and-returned English hero. The Auchinleck manuscript appropriates Sir Tristrem into the Matter of England romances—tales that narrate a history of the nation and were read by fourteenth-century audiences as history or glimpses into the past.
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Date Issued: 2009
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1159
Format: Thesis

Title: A "Good Report of England": Narratives of Production and National Identity in Early Modern Print (1473-1625).
Creator: Brown, Meaghan Jane, Coldiron, Anne E. B., Leushuis, Reinier, Taylor, Gary, Gants, David, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: "A 'Good Report of England'" explores the relationship between nascent conceptions of English nationhood and the development of printers' personas in early modern texts. Although the invention of the printing press is widely understood to have influenced the formation of early modern national identities, the idea that print itself has a history of textual representation has not been factored heavily into that understanding. By examining printers' self-representations and textual narratives of...
Show more"A 'Good Report of England'" explores the relationship between nascent conceptions of English nationhood and the development of printers' personas in early modern texts. Although the invention of the printing press is widely understood to have influenced the formation of early modern national identities, the idea that print itself has a history of textual representation has not been factored heavily into that understanding. By examining printers' self-representations and textual narratives of print-production, this dissertation explores how generic conventions for representing the act of printing develop over the first 150 years of the technology's existence, and in doing so, investigates the relationship between these developing representations and what Richard Helgerson calls the "discursive forms of nationhood." This study draws on close bibliographic study of printed sources as well as manuscript correspondence, Stationers' Company records and legal documents to question the narratives of production told by specific printers within their publications and to problematize the relationship between such narratives and the texts they accompany. Jürgen Habermas's proposed "literary precursor" to the public sphere and Benedict Anderson's "imagined communities" both suppose that a political discourse eventually emerged from print's capacity to engage readers in a discursive community - a community defined by their own engagement with texts. This dissertation argues that printers' epistles manipulated both the concept of community and the concept of readers' engagement as they actively negotiated the terms of print's place in the political landscape. This dissertation focuses on printed texts related to English history and contemporary news events - from verse exemplars of good governance and hagiographies of national heroes, to history plays and polemical news pamphlets - that occurred in multiple editions, either synchronically produced through translation or diachronically reprinted over the period in question. Focusing on often-reprinted texts allows me to examine the adaptations and nuances of paratextual elements, primarily "Printer to the Reader" epistles and frame narratives, and to historicize these elements as they guide the readings of a variety of historical texts. My project asks why an inscribed-printer - often, but not always, authored by the historical printer of a given work - was created to contribute narrative to such works and what the uses of such personae can tell us about the political capital of early modern print.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-7732
Format: Thesis

Title: "He Cannot Be a Gentleman Which Loveth Not Hawking and Hunting": Reading Early Modern English Hunting Treatises as Courtesy Books.
Creator: Lee, Karen A. Kaiser, Boehrer, Bruce T., Vitkus, Daniel, Warren, Nancy Bradley, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The nobility of the Renaissance era enjoyed an elaborate form of hunting, called par force, which involved many horses, dogs, and huntsmen and offered many opportunities for social display. Par force hunting came with a set of ritualized actions and its own unique vocabulary. English monarchs, especially James I, instituted regulations on who could participate based on social status. As the higher social echelons became more permeable, and hunting remained the recreation of choice for those...
Show moreThe nobility of the Renaissance era enjoyed an elaborate form of hunting, called par force, which involved many horses, dogs, and huntsmen and offered many opportunities for social display. Par force hunting came with a set of ritualized actions and its own unique vocabulary. English monarchs, especially James I, instituted regulations on who could participate based on social status. As the higher social echelons became more permeable, and hunting remained the recreation of choice for those of elevated status, this turned the sport into a skill necessary for those new to the court. This study looks at early modern English hunting manuals to examine how they functioned as courtesy literature for those newly admitted to higher levels of society, examining the rhetorical and instructional techniques employed in early modern English hunting treatises to ascertain similarities between to two types of books.
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3363
Format: Thesis

Title: "Her Body Is Her Own": Victorian Feminists, Sexual Violence, and Political Subjectivity.
Creator: Trumble, Kelly Lynn, Standley, Fred, Boutin, Aimee, Burke, Helen, Faulk, Barry, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: During the latter half of the nineteenth century, women publicly confronted the issue of sexual violence for the first time. Feminists campaigned against the state-sanctioned "instrumental rape" perpetrated on women under the Contagious Diseases Acts, demanded access to medical knowledge in order to free themselves from the hands of male doctors, and attacked the marital exemption in rape law, an effort which paved the way for a married woman's legal right to her own body. This dissertation...
Show moreDuring the latter half of the nineteenth century, women publicly confronted the issue of sexual violence for the first time. Feminists campaigned against the state-sanctioned "instrumental rape" perpetrated on women under the Contagious Diseases Acts, demanded access to medical knowledge in order to free themselves from the hands of male doctors, and attacked the marital exemption in rape law, an effort which paved the way for a married woman's legal right to her own body. This dissertation traces the journey of selected Victorian feminists toward political subjectivity by exploring how their discussions of and resistance against sexual violence served as a key portal through which they began to construct themselves as "subjects" with a natural right to bodily integrity. Making use of feminist narratological theories, I analyze the rhetorical strategies emerging from women's non-fictional texts to argue that their resistance against the myriad forms of sexual violence became indistinguishable from the struggle for political subjectivity, the liberties that women believed they held as politically equal individuals. Feminists struck at the heart of liberal political theory, exposing the falsity of the public/private distinction which effectively disqualified women from consideration as civil individuals capable of making choices concerning their own lives and bodies. They appropriated liberalism's theory of liberty and equality, including themselves in that liberal definition to argue that all people, not just men, were created as free and equal individuals with the concomitant right to bodily inviolability. By ignoring the gender discrimination upon which the English constitutional system rested and positioning themselves as political subjects whose freedom of self-ownership was being infringed upon, feminists were, I would suggest, shifting the prevailing assumption of women's rights through ideological change. If women were perceived as civil subjects with all the measures of political freedom granted to them, they could end sexual abuse by affecting the laws that made that abuse possible. However, once women discovered that an ideological shift alone would not prompt male legislators to act on their behalf, they transferred their energies into lobbying for female suffrage, the only means by which they might protect themselves and their own interests.
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Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1508
Format: Thesis

Title: "His-Panic": Latin-American Poetry in Translation.
Creator: Ruiz, Daniel, Department of English
Abstract/Description: Though I learned it first, I no longer speak Spanish fluently. Wishing to reconnect myself to my language and my culture—my own interests also piqued by the romantic sound of the language and the sheer brilliance and precision of the Spanish-language poets I had read—I returned to the language through poetry translation in an attempt to morph what had become unfamiliar (Spanish) into the language with which I have become most familiar (English). The purpose of this presentation is to give...
Show moreThough I learned it first, I no longer speak Spanish fluently. Wishing to reconnect myself to my language and my culture—my own interests also piqued by the romantic sound of the language and the sheer brilliance and precision of the Spanish-language poets I had read—I returned to the language through poetry translation in an attempt to morph what had become unfamiliar (Spanish) into the language with which I have become most familiar (English). The purpose of this presentation is to give insight into processes—of writing, rewriting, translating poems from Spanish to English, and learning to confront and accept the unfamiliar. Over the summer, I traveled to Uruguay and Argentina, where I was forced to speak Spanish only, where even my limited Puerto Rican Spanish was foreign to the European-influenced Spanish of South America. Living in Tallahassee before and after my trip, I worked to improve my Spanish and focused my reading on poets from Latin-American countries and on the notable essays and books on translation that are considered paramount in the field. My period of focus is the twentieth century, and while English-language poets were writing about "The Everyday", their Latin-American counterparts, while still, as Emerson says, embracing "the common," often focused on the big issues of Life, Death, Time, and especially Love. My goal is this: I wish to relay the experience of working in two languages instead of one, and to show how the discourse between languages altered my writing and the way I think about language.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: FSU_migr_undergradresearch-0004
Format: Citation

Title: "How We Got Ovah": Afrocentric Spirituality in Black Arts Movement Women's Poetry.
Creator: Green, Dara Tafakari, McGregory, Jerrilyn, Montgomery, Maxine, Moore, Dennis, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This study, using poetry by Carolyn Rodgers, Sarah Webster Fabio, Sonia Sanchez, Sharon Bourke, Ntozake Shange and Jayne Cortez, examines the manifestations of Afrocentric spirituality in women's writing during the Black Arts Movement. Until recently, there has been a paucity of scholarship on the movement. When studying the BAM, critics have heretofore concentrated on sexism, homophobia, nationalism, and racism as its most prominent aspects. However, BAM writers also have a marked concern...
Show moreThis study, using poetry by Carolyn Rodgers, Sarah Webster Fabio, Sonia Sanchez, Sharon Bourke, Ntozake Shange and Jayne Cortez, examines the manifestations of Afrocentric spirituality in women's writing during the Black Arts Movement. Until recently, there has been a paucity of scholarship on the movement. When studying the BAM, critics have heretofore concentrated on sexism, homophobia, nationalism, and racism as its most prominent aspects. However, BAM writers also have a marked concern with spirituality from an African epistemological standpoint, which brings new possibilities for critical analysis to the forefront. Theorists such as Larry Neal furthermore termed the movement as a spiritual sister to the Black Power Movement. This project contributes to the burgeoning conversation on BAM women's poetry by evaluating the ways in which they deem spirituality as essential for agency as women and as black citizens. I identify three major themes in which women's spirituality serves as a prerequisite for or an enabler of black liberation and revolution. Chapter One explains how Carolyn Rodgers, in her books Songs of a Blackbird and How I Got Ovah, creates personas that initially reject Christianity as a Eurocentric religious construction, but subsequently acknowledge the Afrocentric spirituality of the black church and ascribe to it a revolutionary blackness. Chapter Two demonstrates, through Ntozake Shange's for colored girls who have considered suicide / when the rainbow is enuf and Sonia Sanchez's I've Been a Woman, that women must first give birth to themselves spiritually before they can successfully accomplish the birth of the black nation. Chapter Three examines five poems by Carolyn Rodgers, Jayne Cortez, Sonia Sanchez, Sarah Webster Fabio, and Sharon Bourke, arguing that black women poets activate nommo, the power of words to influence action, when they write jazz poetry; as cultural and spiritual leaders in their own rights, they serve as a type of co-priestess to the black community when they recognize the jazz artist as a spiritual priest. Conclusively, I determine that there is indeed space for the recognition of the intended spiritual goals and accomplishments of the Black Arts Movement, and especially of marginalized black women's poetry.
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-4007
Format: Thesis

Title: "I Am in the, and Thow Are in Me": Finding Feminine Spirtuality in the Book of Margery Kempe.
Creator: Robitaille, Danielle, Warren, Nancy, Johnson, David F., Crook, Eugene, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This paper explores the transition of Margery Kempe from a married laywoman to celibate mystic in The Book of Margery Kempe. Margery grapples with three very different and distinct challenges in the course of finding her spiritual niche in the patriarchal-dominated medieval Church. Margery must first deal with overcoming the Church's view that her body was a site of sinfulness and ontological monstrosity. She then chooses to seek the aid of her spiritual predecessors and discover where she...
Show moreThis paper explores the transition of Margery Kempe from a married laywoman to celibate mystic in The Book of Margery Kempe. Margery grapples with three very different and distinct challenges in the course of finding her spiritual niche in the patriarchal-dominated medieval Church. Margery must first deal with overcoming the Church's view that her body was a site of sinfulness and ontological monstrosity. She then chooses to seek the aid of her spiritual predecessors and discover where she fits into the tradition of female mystics. Finally, she must come to terms with the fact that due to the fact that she was functionally illiterate, she must filter her biography through the hand of a scribe. Throughout all of her experiences, she constantly seeks validation from the male clergy, her spiritual foremothers, and other members of society. However, to alleviate her fears and anxieties, Margery must go within herself, get her narrative written and carve her own space within the Catholic Church. By doing this, she effectively makes her place within the Church, the literary canon, and creates the first autobiography in the English language.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1800
Format: Thesis

Title: "I Kinda Just Messed with It": Investigating Students' Resources for Learning Digital Composing Technologies Outside of Class.
Creator: Keaton, Megan K., Neal, Michael R., McDowell, Stephen D., Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of...
Show moreKeaton, Megan K., Neal, Michael R., McDowell, Stephen D., Yancey, Kathleen Blake, Fleckenstein, Kristie S., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: This dissertation investigates the resources that students use to learn new digital technologies to complete course assignments. This work is particularly important in a time when teachers are assigning more multimodal projects. If students are using and learning digital technologies to complete our assignments, we might argue that we should teach our students how to use the specific technologies they would use for the assignment. Yet, teaching students specific technologies is complicated...
Show moreThis dissertation investigates the resources that students use to learn new digital technologies to complete course assignments. This work is particularly important in a time when teachers are assigning more multimodal projects. If students are using and learning digital technologies to complete our assignments, we might argue that we should teach our students how to use the specific technologies they would use for the assignment. Yet, teaching students specific technologies is complicated for several reasons, including limited time and resources, numerous and quickly obsolete software, different levels of expertise for students and teachers, and more. Because of these complications, students may benefit from spending less time with instruction in specific technologies and more time considering practices for learning new digital technologies. This dissertation works to discover practices that teachers can use in the classroom to help their students learn how to learn new digital technologies in order to compose multimodal texts. To do this, I investigate how students are already learning technologies outside of the classroom and use this investigation to identify possible pedagogical directions. To gain a broader understanding of the resources students are using, I surveyed five sections of an upper-level composition course in which students completed at least one digital assignment. Then, to gain a more nuanced and richer description of resource use, I interviewed three of these students. To analyze the data, I used a framework adapted from Jeanette R. Hill and Michael J. Hannafin's components for Resource-Based Learning (RBL). RBL is a pedagogical approach that aims to teach students how to learn and to produce students who are self-directed problem-solvers, able to work both collaboratively and individually. Though RBL is a pedagogical approach, I used its values and parameters as a lens for understanding students' use of resources. RBL (as the name suggests) puts emphasis on the resources students use to facilitate their learning. Given the wide variety of resources and the ways in which they can be used in the classroom, few scholars articulate precisely what RBL may look like more generally. Hill and Hannafin (2010), however, list four components among which RBL can vary: resources, tools, contexts, and scaffolds. In this study, resource is an umbrella term for the tools, contexts, and humans students may use to support their learning. Tools are the non-human objects that students use to learn new technologies. Humans are the people from whom students seek help. Contexts are the rhetorical situations (specifically the audiences and purposes for composing) surrounding the technological learning, the students' past technological experiences, and the physical locations in which students work. An important element of this study is to identify not only what resources students use, but also how they use their resources; scaffolds are how the resources are used. The scaffolds in this study are as follows: conceptual scaffolds – resources help students decide the order in which to complete tasks, understand the affordances and constraints of the technology, and learn the genre conventions of a given text; metacognitive scaffolds – resources help students tap into their prior knowledge; procedural scaffolds – resources provide students with step-by-step instructions for completing tasks or with definitions of vocabulary; and strategic scaffolds – resources encourage students to experiment in order to learn and solve problems they encounter while learning the technology. In addition to addressing what and how students use resources to learn to perform tasks with the technology, I also examined how students used resources to learn the specialized vocabulary of the technology and the technology's affordances and constraints. The study resulted in eight findings about the ways in which students are using resources. These findings were then used to identify three areas for possible strategies teachers might consider to help students use resources to learn new technologies: 1. Helping students effectively choose technologies, which includes assisting them in (a) using resources to identify technology options and learn about the affordances and constraints of the options and (b) using the affordances and constraints, their composing situations, and the available resources to choose the technology that best meets their needs. 2. Helping students effectively use templates, which includes aiding them in (a) using templates to learn about the genres in which they are composing, (b) selecting effective templates, and (c) altering the templates based on their rhetorical situations and preferences. 3. Helping students learn the technology's specialized vocabulary, which includes assisting them in (a) identifying familiar visual and linguistic vocabulary, (b) making educated guesses about unfamiliar vocabulary, and (c) using resources to learn unfamiliar vocabulary.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: FSU_2017SP_Keaton_fsu_0071E_13707
Format: Thesis

Title: "I'm a Hustler" (or Used to Be): Creating Alternative Black Masculinities in Post-Civil Rights Era African American Hustler Narratives.
Creator: Garnes, Lamar J., Shinn, Christopher, Ashford, Tomeiko, Jones, Maxine, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This study concentrates on the misunderstood and maligned figure of the black hustler to re-assess the 1960s constructions of black masculinity as they inform the politics of race and class mobility in the United States during and after the Civil Rights period. Whereas critics such as David Dudley, Lawrence Goodheart, Patrick Daniel Moynihan, and Terri Hume Oliver, amongst others, have read the black street hustler in terms of psychopathology and criminality, I argue that Claude Brown,...
Show moreThis study concentrates on the misunderstood and maligned figure of the black hustler to re-assess the 1960s constructions of black masculinity as they inform the politics of race and class mobility in the United States during and after the Civil Rights period. Whereas critics such as David Dudley, Lawrence Goodheart, Patrick Daniel Moynihan, and Terri Hume Oliver, amongst others, have read the black street hustler in terms of psychopathology and criminality, I argue that Claude Brown, Malcolm X, and Iceberg Slim enlarge the urban and folkloric roots of the black hustler in order to critique the very foundations of American capitalism itself as well as to challenge the social norms of white middle-class masculinity by mimicking these concepts through hyperbolic performances, which negate both the supposed psychopathology and criminality associated with the black hustler. Although the hustler figure is nearly omnipresent in Claude Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land, Malcolm X's The Autobiography of Malcolm X, and Iceberg Slim's Pimp: The Story of My Life, these selected works tend to be read as autobiographies that rely on conventions of social realism, black nationalism, and/or confessional narratives, focusing exclusively on the negative aspects of the black hustler. Instead, this study claims that the selected texts should be privileged as hustler narratives, drawing attention to the function of the hustler as participating in a wider American tradition of upward class mobility. In the process, the black hustler hyperbolically emulates, criticizes, and rejects or restructures such concepts of individual 'rags-to-riches' capitalism and/or middle class respectability in order to achieve his own status and define his own terms for the construction of alternative black masculinities. Chapter One shows how Brown's Manchild in the Promised Land utilizes the presentation of the hustler to destabilize prevalent articulations of the North as Promised Land in migration narratives and rebuilds community through jazz musicianship and the male-centered community that it creates. Chapter Two posits the hustler in The Autobiography of Malcolm X as a developmental stage that articulates or reproduces itself on the streets, in prison, and within the Nation of Islam and leads Malcolm to an emerging Pan-Africanism through his reliance on, and questioning of, unstable male-centered communities. Chapter Three discusses Iceberg Slim's presentation of the hustler in Pimp: The Story of My Life by highlighting the critical similarities between the pimp and the standard managerial capitalist and reveals how false contrition gains him entry into middle-class status. The Epilogue discusses the work of Nathan McCall and the "strained position of the middle class" as seen through the black male figure, which speaks to the ineffectiveness and lack of functionality that traditional capitalist advancement offers for poor urban settings.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-4356
Format: Thesis

Title: "Monsters More than Men": Interrogating the Captivity Narrative in a Transatlantic Context.
Creator: Taylor, Jennifer, Moore, Dennis, Vitkus, Daniel, Shinn, Christopher, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The third quiet revolution to which my title refers is occurring now. In both literature and history, important changes are taking place, with more and more scholars seriously questioning the methods of each discipline, the validity ofthe disciplinary boundaries institutionalized by our universities, the texts (in a broad as well as narrow sense) typically studied, and the ideologies embedded within our various scholarly enterprises. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word The quotation from...
Show moreThe third quiet revolution to which my title refers is occurring now. In both literature and history, important changes are taking place, with more and more scholars seriously questioning the methods of each discipline, the validity ofthe disciplinary boundaries institutionalized by our universities, the texts (in a broad as well as narrow sense) typically studied, and the ideologies embedded within our various scholarly enterprises. Cathy Davidson, Revolution and the Word The quotation from Cathy Davidson's Revolution and the Word still rings true after 17 years, as the revolution in academia she describes continues to take place. Scholars are redrawing or simply omitting boundaries, including those of nations and cultures, as well as of forms of literature. For this reason, it is time to consider how, for too long, scholars have remained quarantined within the era in which they have developed their expertise, and that narrowness has hurt literary studies. The following thesis includes a discussion of this very topic, and then sets out to demonstrate by discussing the difficult topic of origins. Where does a literary form or genre 'originate?' Is it an author, a place, an era? I contend that it is all three and neither, and no era may lay claim to any distinct form. Since this is true, compartmentalizing English departments into specialties of eras and forms with such little communication does not allow for the more complex readings necessary for understanding. This complexity of origins is demonstrated thereafter with a discussion of captivity narratives, as they have lately been theorized to be the origins of the English novel. By complicating the history of the captivity narratives as a form, and by tracking some of the influences on the form as a whole, this thesis shows that the captivity narrative as a form also lacks a true origin. Why do we begin to separate history into eras, literature into forms, and therefore, compartmentalize ourselves into titles such as "Early Americanist?" Why do so few Early Americanists attend Renaissance conferences, for example? Reaching as far out and beyond as an MA thesis will allow, my project interrogates the captivity narrative in a transatlantic context by mapping out influences and political agendas, and by breaking the divide between Early America and the Renaissance. An example of surprising information I have found by do so is that the narratives written in the English language have been influenced by Arabic culture as early as Medieval times.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1663
Format: Thesis

Title: "My Charms Crack Not, My Spirits Obey": The Promise of Original Practices at Shakespeare's Globe Theatre, 2003-2005.
Creator: Griffin, Brent, Taylor, Gary, Salata, Kris, Daileader, Celia, Gants, David, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: With the opening of London's Bankside Globe, "original practices" (OP) quickly became the buzzword for all theatrical efforts seeking to reconstruct an "authentic" Shakespearean environ for today's audiences. Scholarly discourse surrounding OP's potential influence on contemporary Shakespeare studies and current performance dynamics has certainly increased over the past decade, with a good portion of the commentary focusing on the new Globe's first few seasons of experimental development. And...
Show moreWith the opening of London's Bankside Globe, "original practices" (OP) quickly became the buzzword for all theatrical efforts seeking to reconstruct an "authentic" Shakespearean environ for today's audiences. Scholarly discourse surrounding OP's potential influence on contemporary Shakespeare studies and current performance dynamics has certainly increased over the past decade, with a good portion of the commentary focusing on the new Globe's first few seasons of experimental development. And yet, despite several thorough analyses of their early attempts at recreating early modern playing spaces and staging conditions (architectural considerations aside), little has materialized from the Globe along the lines of an OP manifesto. By examining aesthetic antecedents and contemporary case studies (Globe OP productions, 2003-05), my dissertation will attempt to remedy this particular (if not peculiar, given OP's emphasis on praxis over gnosis) omission by grounding the present shift toward "reconstructive Shakespeare" squarely within the realm of a newly emergent neo-formalism and its reassessment of Renaissance playtexts.
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Date Issued: 2011
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3957
Format: Thesis

Title: "My Soul Looks Back": Exhuming Buried (Hi)Stories in the Chaneysville Incident, Dessa Rose, and Beloved.
Creator: Wholuba, Anita P., Montgomery, Maxine L., Braendlin, Bonnie, Dickson-Carr, Darryl, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Scholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes that "fact and fiction have always exerted a reciprocal effect on each other" ("Authenticity" 29). Authors of neo slave narratives â postmodern renderings of the slave experience â illustrate this reciprocation as they engage in the (re)telling of historical events from the privileged vantage of the present. This study will explore the techniques neo-slave narrative authors use to merge history with imagination in the creation of a fictionalized...
Show moreScholar Henry Louis Gates, Jr. writes that "fact and fiction have always exerted a reciprocal effect on each other" ("Authenticity" 29). Authors of neo slave narratives â postmodern renderings of the slave experience â illustrate this reciprocation as they engage in the (re)telling of historical events from the privileged vantage of the present. This study will explore the techniques neo-slave narrative authors use to merge history with imagination in the creation of a fictionalized history. Although critics have already noted the existing relationship between history and fiction in these narratives, how authors finesse the line between history and imagination remains under explored. The primary texts in this study are Toni Morrison's Beloved, Sherley Anne Williams' Dessa Rose, and David Bradley's The Chaneysville Incident. By examining the dynamics of the commingling of history and imagination, this study will contribute to an understanding of the role of rememory and/or embellishment in the neo slave narrative (sub)genre.
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Date Issued: 2002
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1071
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: "Poema Morale": An Edition from Cambridge, Trinity College B. 14. 52.
Creator: Thomas, Carla M., Treharne, Elaine, Emmerson, Richard, Warren, Nancy, Johnson, David, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis is primarily focused on my modern edition and translation of "Poema Morale," a late twelfth-century English homiletic poem. Not since Richard Morris' great contribution to the study of early medieval literature has anyone produced a full translation of the poem from any of its seven manuscript variants. Because Morris worked 140 years ago when editorial and translation philosophies and practices were vastly different than twenty-first-century policies, a modern translation and...
Show moreThis thesis is primarily focused on my modern edition and translation of "Poema Morale," a late twelfth-century English homiletic poem. Not since Richard Morris' great contribution to the study of early medieval literature has anyone produced a full translation of the poem from any of its seven manuscript variants. Because Morris worked 140 years ago when editorial and translation philosophies and practices were vastly different than twenty-first-century policies, a modern translation and edition are necessary, especially for an introductory student in medieval literature. I begin my thesis with a four-part Introduction that covers the manuscripts in which "Poema Morale" is found; an analysis of Richard Morris' edition and translation for a better understanding of Victorian practices and the poem; an overview of the history of the homiletic tradition that led to the production of this poetic homily; and finally, a discussion of textual variance and how our perception and understanding of "variance" dictates our interpretation and editing of a text. Following the Introduction, I present my Editorial and Translation Policies so that the reader may understand why I made certain choices. My edition and translation follow the explanation of my policies and appear alongside one another. I include endnotes on the text for further explanation of certain editorial or translation decisions that I made. Finally, I include my diplomatic transcription in the Appendix so that the reader may see the manuscript through my eyes. Although first-hand experience with the manuscript can never be replaced, it is my hope that my diplomatic transcription will not only bring the reader closer to the manuscript but will also provide further insight into my editorial decisions. Having never undertaken such a tremendous task, I brought with me the beliefs I formed during my own beginning in the study of medieval literature. I began my medieval studies only two and a half years ago with a total of six courses, and my own frustrations with editions and translations led me to the desire to edit and translate the texts for myself. Through this thesis, I hope to present a modern edition and translation of a pivotal piece of early Middle English literature often forgotten in the medieval literary canon and, thus, the classroom.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1573
Format: Thesis

Title: "Red Spring" and Other Stories.
Creator: Huang, Hsi-Ling, Ortiz-Taylor, Sheila, LeBlanc, Leona, Lan, Feng, Rowe, Anne, Suarez, Virgil, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This collection of short stories contains my work about my homeland, Taiwan, as well as my American experience. Back in Taiwan, I often questioned my identity as a woman in a male dominant society. "Women are worthless" is a poison that passes on from mothers to daughters, generation after generation. When I came to America, I was determined to break the cycle. As I gradually grew accustomed to American ways, I found my feelings towards both lands become even more confused. Living in America...
Show moreThis collection of short stories contains my work about my homeland, Taiwan, as well as my American experience. Back in Taiwan, I often questioned my identity as a woman in a male dominant society. "Women are worthless" is a poison that passes on from mothers to daughters, generation after generation. When I came to America, I was determined to break the cycle. As I gradually grew accustomed to American ways, I found my feelings towards both lands become even more confused. Living in America for all these years has created a gap between my homeland and me that can never be bridged. On the other hand, adopting American ways helps me survive in this country, but doesn't help me fit into the community. I wonder where I actually belong?. As I continued to search for my identity, I began to discover more conflict among human beings. I extended my questioning towards not just my homeland or Chinese culture, but also towards America and its culture. My disappointment towards Taiwanese men was extended towards not just men of any culture, but human beings in general. Looking back, this realization helps me create characters that are more human and stories that are more realistic. The experience has made me become a better writer as well as a better person. I have never regretted the choice I made: coming to America. Neither have I regretted the choice I did not make: born to be a woman.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3684
Format: Thesis

Title: "Something Fouler than the Earth": Death and the Dying Body in British Romantic Literature.
Creator: Unruh, Sarah Elizabeth, Walker, Eric, McNaughton, David, O‘Rourke, James, Outka, Paul, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation examines the intersection between the body as a physical object and nature; the place where this intersection is most unstable is the dying or dead body. Building on Timothy Morton's work in Ecology without Nature, I concentrate on the historical practices surrounding the dead body as it attempts to find a place within nature. Morton's work does not consider important sites of conflict which I take up in my dissertation: the movement of the corpse from intramural churchyards...
Show moreThis dissertation examines the intersection between the body as a physical object and nature; the place where this intersection is most unstable is the dying or dead body. Building on Timothy Morton's work in Ecology without Nature, I concentrate on the historical practices surrounding the dead body as it attempts to find a place within nature. Morton's work does not consider important sites of conflict which I take up in my dissertation: the movement of the corpse from intramural churchyards to extramural cemeteries, the body as natural artifact, and memorialization. Ruth Richardson's Death, Dissection and the Destitute does consider these historical practices and facts in detail, but she does not apply an ecocritical lens, a tool which I use to explore this subject. Medical scholars like Roy Porter, Christopher Lawrence, and James Robert Allard all bring historical context to bear on the body and the place of the doctor in relation to the body; I enter into this conversation by insisting on the inclusion of nature in this topic. I argue that relegating the dead body to a part of nature allows the living to treat it as if it were a natural object, such as a tree or a mountain. That is, making the dead body a natural element allows the living to use the body and dispose of it when it ceases to be useful. As Adam Smith observed, the living cannot pay the debt the dead demand and so the living wish to be rid of the dead and the debt they necessitate. Making the dead just another natural item, as so concretely happens in the Romantic period, is a way to be relieved of this debt. I pursue this topic in readings of texts by Austen, Hazlitt, De Quincey, and Wordsworth.
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Date Issued: 2011
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1456
Format: Thesis

Title: "Spring and All": Forging a Link to the Present Moment.
Creator: Timmons, Travis P., Berry, R. M., Goodman, Robin T., Faulk, Barry, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In Spring and All, William Carlos Williams asserts that his readers' perception is alienated from the world by a "barrier." In particular, he argues that these readers are alienated from the present moment. This state of alienation is affected and maintained, in part, by a version of false art, which Williams deems the "the beautiful illusion." In this thesis, I argue that Spring and All is Williams's attempt to both articulate the alienation problem through the text's prose and resolve the...
Show moreIn Spring and All, William Carlos Williams asserts that his readers' perception is alienated from the world by a "barrier." In particular, he argues that these readers are alienated from the present moment. This state of alienation is affected and maintained, in part, by a version of false art, which Williams deems the "the beautiful illusion." In this thesis, I argue that Spring and All is Williams's attempt to both articulate the alienation problem through the text's prose and resolve the problem by creating the present moment through the text's poems, thus presenting readers the opportunity to remove "the barrier" to their perception of the world. In order to provide a framework for theorizing about our perception of temporality, I turn to Jean-Francois Lyotard's essay, "The Sublime and the Avant Garde," for his philosophy of the present moment. Lyotard's essay, which theorizes the impulse driving modernism, characterizes the present moment as simply "the event," an occurrence preceding our understanding of what that occurrence means. Lyotard argues that such an artist event is sublime in its incommensurability to our understanding, demonstrating the notion that something, rather than nothing has occurred. I argue that the stake of Williams's aesthetic in Spring and All is embedded in this impulse. I examine how the impulse to create the present moment is at work in four of the text's poems, revealing that Spring and All is firmly set within the modernist impulse that Lyotard articulates.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1293
Format: Thesis

Title: "That Inimitable Art": Magic in Early Modern English Culture.
Creator: Hand, Meredith Molly, Boehrer, Bruce, Corrigan, John, Taylor, Gary, Vitkus, Daniel, Warren, Nancy, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: "That Inimitable Art": Magic in Early Modern English Culture examines representations of magical practitioners and their beliefs and practices as they appear in a variety of canonical and non-canonical early modern cultural productions. Drawing on the practice theory of De Certeau and Bourdieu, as well as on Keith Thomas's important work on early modern magic, I elucidate literary and historical moments in which magical practices appear as practices, consider magical discourse in relation to...
Show more"That Inimitable Art": Magic in Early Modern English Culture examines representations of magical practitioners and their beliefs and practices as they appear in a variety of canonical and non-canonical early modern cultural productions. Drawing on the practice theory of De Certeau and Bourdieu, as well as on Keith Thomas's important work on early modern magic, I elucidate literary and historical moments in which magical practices appear as practices, consider magical discourse in relation to other early modern discourses, and explore ways in which magical identities were constructed (by others), performed (by the subject and by the community), and even actively sought, appropriated, and shaped (by the subject). In chapter one, I look at intersections between discourses of poverty and witchcraft, by way of Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, Nashe's Pierce Penniless His Supplication to the Devil, and Middleton's The Black Book. I argue that Middleton's pamphlet highlights the economic foundations of early modern cultural attitudes about witches and rogues and revises the rhetoric of witch and rogue pamphlets, showing the subjects of each in a more sympathetic light. In chapter two, I investigate representations of women workers of magic in Fletcher and Massinger's The Prophetess, Edmond Bower's Doctor Lamb Revived, or witchcraft condemn'd in Anne Bodenham, and Jonson's The Alchemist. I assert that in both Fletcher and Massinger's play and in Bower's pamphlet, women practitioners of magic display features typically associated with the male magus, but whereas the magus is associated with privilege and leisure, these women are involved in active labor—they use their magic to earn a living. In chapter three, I suggest that we broaden our understanding of the emergent public sphere in early modern culture to include "possession events," or moments in which communities gathered to witness the magical practice of possession, whether divine or demonic. It was amid such events that women prophets like Anna Trapnel emerged as public figures. This chapter considers Trapnel's and John Milton's experiences and representations of divine possession, their self-fashioning and emergence as public prophets, and their interactions and engagements with magical discourse and practices, and reveals ways in which gender was simultaneously limiting and enabling for each as they negotiated their public and prophetic identities. Chapter four turns from divine to demonic possession as I discuss plays such as Jonson's Volpone and The Devil is an Ass, Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, and Rowley, Dekker, and Ford's The Witch of Edmonton in light of contemporary beliefs about possession. I demonstrate that stage representations of possession are ambiguous and do not necessarily disable belief, even if they satirize it. While chapter four emphasizes the possibility of belief, chapter five focuses on skepticism as it is expressed in Thomas Middleton's mock-almanacs and mock-prognostications, as well as in his invocation of the genre in dramatic works like No Wit / Help Like a Woman's. I argue that Middleton's several contributions to the popular genre reveal the author playing with its conventions and expressing a distinctive skeptical impulse. I thus close this study by looking at this other strand of magical belief—that is, anti-magical belief—and consider its relationship with the beliefs considered in the previous chapters. Together, these chapters turn our attention to important but understudied early modern texts; they emphasize the overlap among religion, magic, and science; and they complicate the Enlightenment narrative that tells the tale of benighted Renaissance culture giving way to eighteenth-century rationality. If the seventeenth century eventually saw a decline in magic, it also saw the coexistence and confluence of magic and skepticism, religious belief and reason, superstition and science. This study acknowledges such convergences and illuminates the persistent and complex role of magic in the production of early modern culture.
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Date Issued: 2009
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-4291
Format: Thesis

Title: "To Set Himself in Glory Above His Peers": Milton, Petrarch, and the Angst of the Christian Poet.
Creator: Busse, Ashley Denham, Boehrer, Bruce, Vitkus, Daniel, Berry, R. M., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This thesis examines the ways that Augustinian and Petrarchan poetics and philosophy both influenced and frustrated the author of Paradise Lost, for John Milton's works in many ways represent a culmination of the linguistic and moral angst of Augustine and Petrarch, especially in their obsession with the power of rhetoric, a desire for linguistic permanency and power, and the divided consciousness of Western male subjectivity. Indeed, the enduring rhetorical command of Milton's Satan in...
Show moreThis thesis examines the ways that Augustinian and Petrarchan poetics and philosophy both influenced and frustrated the author of Paradise Lost, for John Milton's works in many ways represent a culmination of the linguistic and moral angst of Augustine and Petrarch, especially in their obsession with the power of rhetoric, a desire for linguistic permanency and power, and the divided consciousness of Western male subjectivity. Indeed, the enduring rhetorical command of Milton's Satan in particular, 350 years after his literary creation, attests to the cultural and psychological potency of the model of suffering masculinity. The first chapter locates both Augustinian and Petrarchan influence and religious anxiety in Milton's shorter, earlier poems including his Italian sonnets; the second chapter explores the ways that Milton's elegy, Lycidas, both imitates and rejects Petrarchan and classical tropes; the third chapter explores these ideas in Paradise Lost, especially the ways that the character of Satan embodies Milton's views on rhetoric and poetry. The end result will be a fuller appreciation of the anxiety that a modern, Christian poet, heir of Augustinian and Petrarchan poetics, displays through his art, especially the conflict between the desire for linguistic glory and permanency and a conviction that such ambition is inherently sinful according to Christian morality.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-2420
Format: Thesis

Title: The "Trafalgar Square Conservation Area": Deconstructing Spatial Narratives with/in a Collective Framework.
Creator: Bergholtz, Joel, Department of English
Abstract/Description: Abstract: (Key Terms: Collective Framework, Rhetorical Theory, Trafalgar Square, Spatial Narratives) This thesis is a rhetorical examination of language as elicited in spatial narratives. In doing so, it examines the various symbols that public spaces employ in order to rhetorically speak to us, move us, and make us act in certain ways. More specifically, it addresses Trafalgar Square as a problem space, deconstructing the various spatial narratives leading into and within the square. In...
Show moreAbstract: (Key Terms: Collective Framework, Rhetorical Theory, Trafalgar Square, Spatial Narratives) This thesis is a rhetorical examination of language as elicited in spatial narratives. In doing so, it examines the various symbols that public spaces employ in order to rhetorically speak to us, move us, and make us act in certain ways. More specifically, it addresses Trafalgar Square as a problem space, deconstructing the various spatial narratives leading into and within the square. In deconstructing these narratives, it attempts to find implicit meaning in what is explicitly inscribed into the land, and to examine this meaning alongside the social narrative that its occupants hold. This constructed narrative is explored through three frameworks: that of the physical framework of the square, those spatially enacted frameworks leading into it, and the larger collective framework of the city to which the square contributes. It finds that the frameworks of public space generally work toward establishing and authorizing a unifying ideological connection between the present society and societies of the past. However, these narratives are dependent on individual agents participating in the space's various frameworks; the meaning of a space is obfuscated by a society's current participant's usage of the space. In addition to this obfuscation, it discovers that the past role of a space can obfuscate the present meaning and role of the space in the overall framework, and that the present meaning can in turn obfuscate how individuals relate to and interpret the past.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0294
Format: Thesis

Title: "What's Love Got to Do with It?": The Master-Slave Relationship in Black Women's Neo-Slave Narratives.
Creator: Price, Jodi L., Montgomery, Maxine Lavon, Jones, Maxine Deloris, Moore, Dennis D., Ward, Candace, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: A growing impulse in American black female fiction is the reclamation of black female sexuality due to slavery's proliferation of sexual stereotypes about black women. Because of slave law's silencing of rape culture, issues of consent, will, and agency become problematized in a larger dilemma surrounding black humanity and the repression of black female sexuality. Since the enslaved female was always assumed to be willing, because she is legally unable to give consent or resist, locating...
Show moreA growing impulse in American black female fiction is the reclamation of black female sexuality due to slavery's proliferation of sexual stereotypes about black women. Because of slave law's silencing of rape culture, issues of consent, will, and agency become problematized in a larger dilemma surrounding black humanity and the repression of black female sexuality. Since the enslaved female was always assumed to be willing, because she is legally unable to give consent or resist, locating black female desire within the confines of slavery becomes largely impossible. Yet, contemporary re-imaginings of desire in this context becomes an important point of departure for re-membering contemporary black female subjectivity. "What's Love Got to Do With It?" is an alternative look at master-slave relationships, particularly those between white men and black women, featured in contemporary slave narratives by black women writers. Although black feminist critics have long considered love an unavailable, if not, unthinkable construct within the context of interracial relationships during slavery, this project locates this unexpected emotion within four neo-slave narratives. Finding moments of love and desire from, both, slaveholders and slaves, this study nuances monolithic historical players we are usually quick to adjudicate. Drawing on black feminist criticism, history, and critical race theory, this study outlines the importance of exhuming these historic relationships from silence, acknowledging the legacies they left for heterosexual love and race relations, and exploring what lessons we can take away from them today. Recognizing the ongoing tension between remembering and forgetting and the inherent value in both, this study bridges the gap by delineating the importance of perspective and the stories we choose to tell. Rather than being forever haunted by traumatic memories of the past and proliferating stories of violence and abuse, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Octavia Butler, Gayle Jones, and Gloria Naylor's novels reveal that there are ways to negotiate the past, use what you need, and come to a more holistic place where love is available.
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Date Issued: 2017
Identifier: FSU_2017SP_Price_fsu_0071E_13737
Format: Thesis

Title: "When My Pen Begins to Run": Class, Gender, and Nation in the Poetry of Christian Milne.
Creator: Meehan, Kathryn Stewart, Walker, Eric, Faulk, Barry, Burke, Helen, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Christian Milne's Simple Poems on Simple Subjects contains fifty-six poems, including autobiographical poems, fictional narratives, and songs, all created by the working-class Scottish poet who was born in Inverness in 1773. Milne's collection was published in 1805 by J. Chalmers and Co., in Aberdeen, Scotland. Little is known about the distribution of the volume, but, in the final poem in the volume, Upon Seeing the List of Subscribers to this Little Work, Milne includes the list of the...
Show moreChristian Milne's Simple Poems on Simple Subjects contains fifty-six poems, including autobiographical poems, fictional narratives, and songs, all created by the working-class Scottish poet who was born in Inverness in 1773. Milne's collection was published in 1805 by J. Chalmers and Co., in Aberdeen, Scotland. Little is known about the distribution of the volume, but, in the final poem in the volume, Upon Seeing the List of Subscribers to this Little Work, Milne includes the list of the volume's extensive financial supporters, consisting of 523 individual subscribers. The poems appear to be in no particularly significant order, but most of the songs and "tales" are included together while the autobiographical poems are scattered throughout the volume. Most of the poems in the volume are written in the form of pentameter couplets, tetrameter couplets, or stanzas of "common meter," or hymn meter. Milne's poetry has received little critical attention largely due to its scarcity. According to the Worldcat Database, only six copies of Milne's collection exist in libraries worldwide: Glasgow University, Harvard, New York Public Library, University of Alberta, University of Western Ontario, and University of California-Davis. The UC-Davis copy has recently been made available electronically in two databases: the open website British Women Romantic Poets, 1789-1832, sponsored by the Shields Library at UC-Davis since 1999, and the commercial database Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period, issued by the Alexander Street Press in collaboration with the University of Chicago in 2002. This electronic availability of rare archival materials provided the opportunities to research Milne's work for this thesis. The one piece of published criticism on Milne's poetry to date is Bridget Keegan's introduction to Milne's collection in the Scottish Women Poets database. Milne, as revealed through her autobiographical Preface, Introductory Verses, and through her array of autobiographical poems, began life as one of ten children, her father a successful cabinet maker. Following the deaths of her mother and eight of her siblings, Milne and her father travelled by foot from Stonehaven, near Aberdeen, to Edinburgh, where the two lived, suffering through poverty and illness. Milne supported her father monetarily, by working as a servant, and emotionally, as he battled consumption and bouts of depression. Her autobiographical introductory sections, as well as her autobiographical poems, reveal a woman who describes her tumultuous past from the relative comfort and security of a seemingly happy marriage back in Aberdeen, enjoying her roles as the wife of a ship's carpenter, Patrick Milne, as the mother of four children, and her role as a writer, as well. All of her poems work together to reveal the complexities of her identity as a working-class mother, wife, and writer. In this thesis, I focus on eleven of Milne's poems and divide them into three chapters, titled, 1) Humble Confidence: Poems of Address to Members of the Upper-Classes; 2) Negotiations of Womanhood, Writing, and Self; and 3) A Scottish Briton: War, Peace, and Nationality. These three groupings specifically examine several crucial elements of Milne's poetry: her negotiation of her own gender and class identity as revealed through her addresses to other women and men, particularly those in the upper classes; her self-reflection and self-analysis as a working-class wife, mother, and writer; and her unique perspective on war, peace, nation and empire as a working-class Scottish woman.
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Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-2505
Format: Thesis

Title: "Yes, Injured Woman! Rise, Assert Thy Right!": Anna Letitia Barbauld and the Feminine Ideal.
Creator: Dustin, Sara, Walker, Eric, Burke, Helen, O'Rourke, James, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: In this thesis, I will examine the poetry and prose of a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writer, Anna Letitia Barbauld. Through the early 1970s, literary scholarship on the Romantic period focused almost exclusively on male canonical writers such as Wordsworth and Keats. By focusing on the work of a popular and prolific female writer such as Barbauld, I hope to contribute to the debate on what is considered Romantic. My overall thesis is that despite the evidence of Barbauld's...
Show moreIn this thesis, I will examine the poetry and prose of a late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writer, Anna Letitia Barbauld. Through the early 1970s, literary scholarship on the Romantic period focused almost exclusively on male canonical writers such as Wordsworth and Keats. By focusing on the work of a popular and prolific female writer such as Barbauld, I hope to contribute to the debate on what is considered Romantic. My overall thesis is that despite the evidence of Barbauld's conventionally "feminine" poems as well as her own personal history, Barbauld was not a simple antifeminist or mere schoolmistress, but rather an important contributor to the debates in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century concerning feminine identity, and moreover, the feminine ideal. The first chapter discusses the Romantic era's timeline, explores Barbauld's interaction with her contemporaries, exposes the many obstacles to women writers of Barbauld's era, and reviews Barbauld's reception history. In the introduction, I will first discuss Barbauld's place in the Romantic century. If we think of Barbauld as an early Romantic (she began publishing in 1773 and most of her major literary contributions were made before 1800), a different account of Romanticism emerges. I will then give a brief biography of Barbauld, which will include her interaction with other Romantic writers such as Wordsworth and Coleridge, and conclude the introduction by discussing the past neglect of Barbauld and other Romantic women writers. In the second chapter, I move on to compare Barbauld with one of her more radical female contemporaries, Mary Wollstonecraft. Given that critics such as Marlon B. Ross and Mary Wollstonecraft labeled Barbauld as an antifeminist based upon poems such as "To a Ladywith some painted Flowers" and "The Rights of Woman," I think it is important to examine the considerable number of similarities between Wollstonecraft and Barbauld. In Barbauld's works "Fashion: A Vision" and "Epistle to William Wilberforce," her language and ideas sound remarkably similar to that of Wollstonecraft's. Both criticize their society's construction of marriage as well as the upper class women of their day, and both writers believe that women should be more concerned with improving their minds than with obsessing over fashion. Finally, in the third chapter I explore how Barbauld subtly undermined the belief system of her day by identifying women's exclusion from the masculine sphere, asserting the validity of desire, and affirming the power of the feminine consciousness. Barbauld's poems "Inscription for an Ice-House" and "The Mouse's Petition" also offer feminist critiques regarding the social order that persists in controlling women in eighteenth-century England. Moreover, in poems such as "A Summer Evening's Meditation," "Corsica," and "Washing-Day," Barbauld uses female consciousness as a distinct counterbalance to male consciousness. These three poems refute cultural stereotypes of women in their assigned domestic roles by showing the power of female subjectivity. I will conclude my paper by discussing the problem of the British Romantic literary canon. Mary Favret calls Barbauld and Felicia Hemans "newly canonized writers," but I doubt whether other literary critics would agree with her assessment. The problem of canonization and women writers is not easily resolved, given that women writers such as Barbauld are usually regarded as mere complements to the work of the six (male) established canonical writers. An examination of important female authors is important, therefore, in order to open up the debate on canonization and Romanticism.
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Date Issued: 2002
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-0622
Format: Thesis

Title: (Re)Imagined Textual Geographies.
Creator: Bridgman, Katherine, Fleckenstein, Kristie, Yancey, Kathleen, Neal, Michael, Coxwell-Teague, Deborah, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This study addresses the following questions: how can we account for the emergence and change of a discipline and what is the role of the individual in this change? I answer these questions through a case study of the discipline of Basic Writing in which I explicate the textual identities of the Basic Writer and the Basic Writing instructor. The data set of disciplinary texts that used in this study center on two "moments" in the discipline's history. The first "moment" is that of the...
Show moreThis study addresses the following questions: how can we account for the emergence and change of a discipline and what is the role of the individual in this change? I answer these questions through a case study of the discipline of Basic Writing in which I explicate the textual identities of the Basic Writer and the Basic Writing instructor. The data set of disciplinary texts that used in this study center on two "moments" in the discipline's history. The first "moment" is that of the discipline's inception in the 1970s. The second "moment" is that of a disciplinary change that occurred in the early 1990s. I answer the two research questions posed by this study by drawing from two theoretical frameworks. The first is that of Said in his seminal work of cultural criticism, Orientalism. Said enables this study to account for the initial emergence of a discipline. This methodological approach, however, frames disciplines as closed systems and obscures the agency of individuals who join the discipline after its initial emergence and the discipline's change. Here, mobility theory complements this first theoretical frame through which we see Basic Writing behaving as a discipline. Mobility theory frames disciplinary formations as open systems and enables this study to see authors as active agents in the change of a discipline. The composite methodological framework of this thesis is applied to the two collections of texts that I examine through asking three key questions: who is the Basic Writer? who is the instructor of Basic Writing? what is the location of the Basic Writing classroom? On the basis of this analysis, this study accounts for the emergence of disciplinary formations, the fluidity of these formations as well, and the agency of individual authors in this change. It reveals that, while Said focuses on one moment of emergence, disciplines unfold in terms of multiple moments of (re)emergence. In these moments of (re)emergence, authors actively align their texts with surrounding power structures. Within these texts, disciplinary authors craft multiple fluid and overlapping identities that authorize their voice within these texts, within the narratives that they construct of the Basic Writing classroom, and within the lived experience of their readers. The primary implication of this study is in regard to the discipline of Basic Writing. Although this disciplinary formation may appear to be in a moment of crisis, this study suggests that perhaps this discipline is moving into a moment of (re)emergence in which the Basic Writer will again become textually visible in this moment. This study also suggests that agency is always mediated as it is through the texts that they create that the authors in the study are active agents. Their agency is expressed through the fluid and overlapping textual identities that they enact within the texts of this study. Finally, this study illuminates a reciprocal relationship between scholars and the disciplines that write them into the world of academia. Individuals are not passively written into their roles within the University. Instead, they at once write and are written by the collective textual identities that emerge from the disciplinary texts that articulate a shared understanding of and knowledge about the Basic Writer.
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Date Issued: 2010
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3042
Format: Thesis

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

Title: Addressing the Situation: An Analysis of the CCCC Chairs' Addresses of the Last 11 Years (1998-2008).
Creator: Lee, Rory Amundson, Yancey, Kathleen, Fleckenstein, Kristie, Neal, Michael, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This project extends Ellen Barton's 1997 historical study of the first twenty CCCC Chairs' Addresses where she examines what she calls "a tradition of […] 'evocative gestures'—the articulation of broad concerns in the field" (235). In her analysis, Barton demonstrates two themes: (1) accordant gestures about the complexity of teaching composition and the service this teaching provides to students and the community and (2) conflicting gestures about how best to represent the field through...
Show moreThis project extends Ellen Barton's 1997 historical study of the first twenty CCCC Chairs' Addresses where she examines what she calls "a tradition of […] 'evocative gestures'—the articulation of broad concerns in the field" (235). In her analysis, Barton demonstrates two themes: (1) accordant gestures about the complexity of teaching composition and the service this teaching provides to students and the community and (2) conflicting gestures about how best to represent the field through research and where the field should be housed within the academy. Since her study, there have been eleven new Addresses and thus an exigence for additional research. This project responds to that exigence by analyzing the past eleven CCCC Chairs' Addresses, starting with Cynthia Selfe's in 1998 and concluding with Cheryl Glenn's in 2008. The results from this research show the emergence of three new themes in gestures different from the two Barton identifies: recurring gestures about (1) literacy, (2) our stake in writing, and (3) diversity. This project makes two significant contributions to our understanding of our own history: (1) using a coherent set of texts, it maps the important topics in our field over the last eleven years, and (2) using Barton's themes as an historical context, it illustrates how the focus in our field has changed since the inception of the CCCC Chair's Address in 1977.
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Date Issued: 2009
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3160
Format: Thesis

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

Title: Affectionately Yours: Women's Correspondence Networks in Eighteenth-Century British America.
Creator: McLallen, Wendy Weston, Hadden, Sally, Edwards, Leigh, Laughlin, Karen L., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation examines epistolary manuscripts circulated among networks of women in eighteenth-century British America. The women saved and collected correspondence, copied important letters into commonplace books, and composed entire journals in letter format for family member or close friends. These writings, as they circulated from hand to hand, helped to solidify culturally significant social networks. This dissertation delves into the markedly performative nature of these writings...
Show moreThis dissertation examines epistolary manuscripts circulated among networks of women in eighteenth-century British America. The women saved and collected correspondence, copied important letters into commonplace books, and composed entire journals in letter format for family member or close friends. These writings, as they circulated from hand to hand, helped to solidify culturally significant social networks. This dissertation delves into the markedly performative nature of these writings and asks: even though these women writers, ostensibly, did not intend their texts for public consumption, to what extent did those texts provide public stages on which the women could rehearse, control, inscribe, or elide the fluid, yet often conflicting subject positions of the era? This dissertation examines five specific networks of writing women in eighteenth-century British America. Chapter one focuses on the writings of Elizabeth Fergusson, Annis Stockton, Hannah Griffitts, Milcah Moore, and Susannah Wright, the group of writers known as the "Philadelphia coterie," and uses their letters to establish epistolary patterns that inform my readings of the other networks of women writers—the same patterns that will ultimately influence the earliest epistolary fiction. Chapter two examines the diary of Grace Galloway and the letters of Anne Hulton, two avowedly loyalist women in British America. Chapter three focuses on the life and letters of shopkeeper Elizabeth Murray and her network of women merchants while chapter four examines the letters of the two most historically recognizable women in this study: Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren. The networks of women I address in these chapters span multiple generations, and this multi-generational dynamic leaves a legacy of friendship that can help us better understand and locate the belles lettres of British America. However, the writings generated by these networks also leave a literary legacy that allows us to reconsider other writings in other genres, and it is to that endeavor I turn in the conclusion. The conclusion looks at Hannah Foster's epistolary novels in the context of early-American networks of writing women and uses the women's manuscripts to reposition the early-American novel.
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Date Issued: 2007
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-2527
Format: Thesis

Title: After the Sun Fell: A Novella.
Creator: Croley, Michael J., Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Kirby, David, Stuckey-French, Ned, Winegardner, Mark, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This manuscript is a novella entitled, After the Sun Fell, which traces the early lives of its two main characters, Shin Moon-Cha, a young Korean girl who meets, falls in love, and marries an American Soldier, Robert Asher, and moves with him to rural southeastern Kentucky in the late 1960s.
Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3026
Format: Thesis

Title: The Afterlife, with Harry Houdini: A Novel.
Creator: Bonner, Nora, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Shacochis, Bob, Stuckey-French, Ned, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The premise for this short novel, The Afterlife, with Harry Houdini, derives from the legend that Houdini made a pact with his wife, Bess, to return to her and explain his experience after death; also, from the fact that he died on October 31, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan. Houdini's afterlife begins as the city's population boomed after Henry Ford offered five dollars a day to laborers on his assembly line. Much of the writing has explored Detroit as the backdrop, particularly in the early 20th...
Show moreThe premise for this short novel, The Afterlife, with Harry Houdini, derives from the legend that Houdini made a pact with his wife, Bess, to return to her and explain his experience after death; also, from the fact that he died on October 31, 1926 in Detroit, Michigan. Houdini's afterlife begins as the city's population boomed after Henry Ford offered five dollars a day to laborers on his assembly line. Much of the writing has explored Detroit as the backdrop, particularly in the early 20th Century in attempts to understand the city before its post-industrial decline. Having lost over one million citizens in a six-decade span, Detroit resembles a ghost town; neighborhoods of abandoned houses, factories, schools, and commercial buildings are scattered across the city. In many ways, this novel investigates how Detroit went from a place of promise and prosperity to its current state, as its timeline spans from Houdini's lifetime (1874-1926) to the present.
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Date Issued: 2013
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-8138
Format: Thesis

Title: The Age of Strongmen.
Creator: Lari, Jordan A., Suarez, Virgil, Kirby, David, Stuckey-French, Ned, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: "The Age of Strongmen" is the opening excerpt of a novel in progress. The excerpt covers the opening four chapters and follows the parallel stories of two characters: Jules, the child of a poor woman and a delinquent father; and Sunra, the Turkish refugee turned circus strongman, in Atlanta and the American South at the turn of the twentieth century. The novel follows Jules as he runs away from home. Similarly, it also follows Sunra's escape from certain poverty in Istanbul after a short...
Show more"The Age of Strongmen" is the opening excerpt of a novel in progress. The excerpt covers the opening four chapters and follows the parallel stories of two characters: Jules, the child of a poor woman and a delinquent father; and Sunra, the Turkish refugee turned circus strongman, in Atlanta and the American South at the turn of the twentieth century. The novel follows Jules as he runs away from home. Similarly, it also follows Sunra's escape from certain poverty in Istanbul after a short career as a street performer propels him into joining a troupe of travelling strongmen, an enterprise that first leads him to fame and prestige in Europe, through demise of the troupe after arriving in America, to his final rebirth as a great circus performer, the greatness of which is ultimately illuminated by the profound relationship he develops with Jules, the burgeoning understudy who together with Sunra experiences his first truly paternal relationship. Jules has a grand capacity for imagination, and the boy's fantastical imagination colors his narrative with fantastical realities that may or may not exist in the magical story book world of a young boy's imagination where dreams and realities melt together. In this lens, the world becomes the circus in which the narrative finally lands and in which both characters live and flourish. The text that will comprise this thesis will be made up of the opening four chapters of this story. These chapters will tell the following tales: Jules's first encounter with Sunra during a childhood outing with his estranged father; Jules's brief relationship with a neighborhood friend which ends abruptly after a racial incident in Atlanta, and after which Jules runs away from home; The boyhood of Sunra in Istanbul, the tale of his street performing and his running off with the troupe of strongmen; and the travels of Jules through the wilderness and as a stowaway on trains in pursuit of the circus. This builds the first section of the novel which takes Jules from his first experience with Sunra until the point that they actually meet.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3278
Format: Thesis

Title: The Alchemy of Sexuality in Early Modern English Lyric Poetry.
Creator: Jennings, Lisa Gay, Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, Upchurch, Charles, Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Johnson, David F. (David Frame), Vitkus, Daniel J., Florida State...
Show moreJennings, Lisa Gay, Boehrer, Bruce Thomas, Upchurch, Charles, Coldiron, A. E. B. (Anne Elizabeth Banks), Johnson, David F. (David Frame), Vitkus, Daniel J., Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
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Abstract/Description: My dissertation, The Alchemy of Sexuality in Early Modern English Lyric Poetry examines the complex relationship of poetry, sexuality and religion to alchemy in early modern England. I analyze poetic representations of transgressive sexuality by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Carew. What emerges from my study is the profound link between alchemical metaphors and poetic expressions of sexuality. These poetic expressions of sexuality develop the poets'...
Show moreMy dissertation, The Alchemy of Sexuality in Early Modern English Lyric Poetry examines the complex relationship of poetry, sexuality and religion to alchemy in early modern England. I analyze poetic representations of transgressive sexuality by William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, John Donne, Thomas Nashe, and Thomas Carew. What emerges from my study is the profound link between alchemical metaphors and poetic expressions of sexuality. These poetic expressions of sexuality develop the poets' interrogation of gender hierarchy in early modern England. This dissertation has theoretical implications for how we read early modern English poetry, but there are also physiological dimensions. I examine representations of sex and the disciplined Foucauldian early modern body. Notwithstanding, my primary focus of this disciplined body are the humoral processes that were thought to govern early modern physiology and their Galenic ties to alchemy. As my study makes clear, alchemy represents an interventionist conjunction within the Galenic-Humoral economy that predominated in early modern England. In each chapter I illuminate the means by which the poets utilize alchemical iconography to codify a transgressive body and therefore illuminate an illicit sexuality. In the introductory chapter, I outline the history of alchemy and its relationship to sexuality and religion, and by extension to the early modern body. I end the introduction by asserting that the poets' use of alchemy is not only a symbol of the creative imagination, but also an attempt to map the contours of desire and the poetic mind. Chapter two focuses on books 2 and 3 of Spenser's epic, The Faerie Queene. In this chapter I seek to develop a theory which will account for the excessive erotica found in these books. At first glance the anachronistic term of pornography would seem to account for the sexual activity found in these books. Nonetheless, pornography's contextual later development, and the slipperiness of the term fail to accommodate early modern theories of erotic reading and the disruptive emotions engendered by such readings. Therefore, I suggest the term of passionate discourse which more fully explains the voyeuristic nature of Spenser's epic and his ability to suspend the assault on the body which erotica could potentially provoke. In chapter three I continue my examination of alchemy and its ties to sexuality by a detailed analysis of Shakespeare's "procreative sonnets." I discuss Shakespeare's use of alchemy which enables his creation of a sexually appropriate hermaphrodite thus challenging regimes against the practice of sodomy. While chapter three focuses on Shakespeare's hermaphroditic creation, chapter four considers Donne's appropriation of alchemy in order to substantiate what I term an alchemic transcendental sexuality. Donne's alchemic sexuality is constituted by the metaphors of alchemy as well as the religious discourse of Familism. As with Spenser and Shakespeare, Donne ultimately challenges sexual understandings of the body and the systems that sought to impose artificial and sexual boundaries on the early modern body. Similarly, chapter five contemplates sexual challenges to religious understanding of the body. My focus is Thomas Nashe's "The Choise of Valentines" and Thomas Carew's "A Rapture." Both Nashe and Carew use their speakers to trope sexual performance as alchemical labor and to interrogate women's reproductive potential. Lastly, I conclude this study by commenting on the aesthetic success of the poems. I believe that those poems which have found a prominent place in the English literary canon owe their prominence to how well they have integrated the discourses of alchemy, sex, and religion in their more overtly sexual poetry. Yet ultimately, this dissertation is about the process of embodiment, and therefore I assert that each poet in this dissertation anchor themselves in the slippery terrain of alchemy in a concerted effort to find meaning among the chaos of the body.
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Date Issued: 2015
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9358
Format: Thesis

Title: All News Is Good News.
Creator: Schurer, Kelsey E., Department of English
Abstract/Description: Kelsey Schurer has compiled a collection of her work, both fiction and poetry, that explores the female perspective coming-of-age through story-telling. Joyce Carol Oates says in her introduction to her edited anthology Telling Stories, "We look to stories, our own and others', as we look into mirrors: that which is locked inside of us can be released by the magic of another's art, or maybe our own." All News Is Good News explores the female perspective and how the self changes through...
Show moreKelsey Schurer has compiled a collection of her work, both fiction and poetry, that explores the female perspective coming-of-age through story-telling. Joyce Carol Oates says in her introduction to her edited anthology Telling Stories, "We look to stories, our own and others', as we look into mirrors: that which is locked inside of us can be released by the magic of another's art, or maybe our own." All News Is Good News explores the female perspective and how the self changes through relations with family and friends, men and women. Her narratives focus on women who realize their own self-worth, or redefine self-image through the relationships they struggle in and out of, and through the people they can't seem to let go.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_uhm-0426
Format: Thesis

Title: All the Devils.
Creator: Mink, Chris, Belieu, Erin, Kavka, Martin, Kirby, David, Kimbrell, James, Roberts, Diane, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This manuscript is a collection of poems that relies in part on an unavoidable lineage of Southern poetics, while simultaneously asserting a divergence from that poetic and reimagining how reconciliations with that lineage may be reached. Likewise, the personalities and voices within each poem play a contributing role in the flawed specter of place and event. In exchange for their confession and self-implication of deeds, fantasies, and fears, they seek a kind of pride not found in the simple...
Show moreThis manuscript is a collection of poems that relies in part on an unavoidable lineage of Southern poetics, while simultaneously asserting a divergence from that poetic and reimagining how reconciliations with that lineage may be reached. Likewise, the personalities and voices within each poem play a contributing role in the flawed specter of place and event. In exchange for their confession and self-implication of deeds, fantasies, and fears, they seek a kind of pride not found in the simple narratives of redemption.
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Date Issued: 2014
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-9218
Format: Thesis

Title: All the Good Numbers.
Creator: Whitworth, Richard Casey, Winegardner, Mark, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: This novel represents the culmination of my work over the last three years at Florida State University, featuring many of the thematic elements I've explored in short fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. ALL THE GOOD NUMBERS is an extended study of familial dysfunction, grief, unrequited (and also unconditional) love, religion, Caribbean myth, the fallibility of memory, the insidiousness of racism and sexism, and the bitterness of familial estrangement.
Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: 2018_Fall_Whitworth_fsu_0071N_14937
Format: Thesis

Title: Along a Shoreless Motorway.
Creator: Corey, Matthew Reed, Kimbrell, James, Kirby, David, Belieu, Erin, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: I wrote this collection of poems from a fascination with both the Cosmos and the mythology that illustrates its elusiveness and integrity, its ability to accommodate the entirety of the Unknown as well as the already beloved. These poems – when considered holistically – may be understood as a model that mimics my own experience at consciousness and dreaming, as a map of the author's nervous system. Taking as a vehicle the character L. M. Fish, the series seeks to explore and re-imagine the...
Show moreI wrote this collection of poems from a fascination with both the Cosmos and the mythology that illustrates its elusiveness and integrity, its ability to accommodate the entirety of the Unknown as well as the already beloved. These poems – when considered holistically – may be understood as a model that mimics my own experience at consciousness and dreaming, as a map of the author's nervous system. Taking as a vehicle the character L. M. Fish, the series seeks to explore and re-imagine the mythos of the contemporary West.
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Date Issued: 2005
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3386
Format: Thesis

Title: Alternative Composition Pedagogies: Multimedia, Alternate Style, and Social Constructionist/Expressivist Teaching Practices.
Creator: Szczepanski, Jay D., Bishop, Wendy, Fenstermaker, John, Teague, Deborah Coxwell, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This portfolio exam contains four essays, a bibliographic essay, and a teaching philosophy, as well as attendant teaching materials in the appendices. These materials work together to present one composition instructor's position on non-standard composing practices and his decentered approach to classroom management. Included in this thesis are two essays that deal specifically with multimedia composition ("Multimedia Composition, Process Pedagogy, and First Year Writing," and "Why Not...
Show moreThis portfolio exam contains four essays, a bibliographic essay, and a teaching philosophy, as well as attendant teaching materials in the appendices. These materials work together to present one composition instructor's position on non-standard composing practices and his decentered approach to classroom management. Included in this thesis are two essays that deal specifically with multimedia composition ("Multimedia Composition, Process Pedagogy, and First Year Writing," and "Why Not Hypertext?"), a bibliographic essay that serves as an introduction to alternate style, one student-centered pedagogical paper that addresses the hazy issue of "voice" in student writing, and a teaching philosophy paired with an essay that deals with the issues that gay teachers face in small composition classrooms.
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Date Issued: 2003
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1474
Format: Thesis

Title: American Accent.
Creator: Wrozynski, Dominika, Kirby, David, Galeano, Juan Carlos, Kimbrell, James, Faulk, Barry, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: The poems in the dissertation, American Accent, are a unification of the hybrid identity of their writer. The poems explore what it means to be American, geographically and mentally, for a Polish-American 'migr' writer. The poems begin with the speaker's immigrant experience and American assimilation, and move geographically to New Mexico, ending in the speaker's experience of the quotidian world.
Date Issued: 2009
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-7258
Format: Thesis

Title: American Exodus: Challenging Narratives of Exceptionalism in Contemporary American Literature.
Creator: Littler, Lucy R., Patterson, Robert, Montgomery, Maxine, Jones, Maxine, Parrish, Timothy, Moore, Dennis, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation examines how selected contemporary American authors have appropriated and revised elements of the biblical Exodus narrative in order to challenge American Exceptionalism, an ideology itself originally constructed and reified via Exodus rhetoric. Beginning with the seventeenth-century Puritan conception of America as a 'city upon a hill,' ideological descendants of the exceptionalist belief in the predetermined and beneficent nature of American 'progress' have included...
Show moreThis dissertation examines how selected contemporary American authors have appropriated and revised elements of the biblical Exodus narrative in order to challenge American Exceptionalism, an ideology itself originally constructed and reified via Exodus rhetoric. Beginning with the seventeenth-century Puritan conception of America as a 'city upon a hill,' ideological descendants of the exceptionalist belief in the predetermined and beneficent nature of American 'progress' have included Manifest Destiny, the American Dream, and the historical narrative connecting slavery, emancipation, and the civil rights movement. Critics such as Sacvan Bercovitch and Deborah Madsen have usefully explored how communal identities and political agendas conceived through Exodus rhetoric have often produced cultural cohesion via the marginalization of socially constructed racial 'others.' Building on their important work, this project considers how authors have critiqued this framework and its re-appropriation from within these marginalized spaces. I bring together for the first time both black and white authors of the late twentieth century whose revisions of the Exodus narrative problematize the conflation of racial solidarity, individual empowerment, and social progress. Drawing on theoretical models of racial meaning developed by Kimberl' Crenshaw, my intersectionalist approach seeks to complicate the exclusivist and monolithic racial binaries inherent in (re)appropriations of the Exodus paradigm and explore how this exceptionalist framework can actually marginalize an individual from within his or her own perceived racial group. Specifically, in the first and second chapters of this dissertation I argue that Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian and E. L. Doctorow's Ragtime manipulate the Exodus metaphor in order to destabilize 'whiteness' as the embodiment of radical individualism and the imperialistic acquisition of social power. Similarly, in the third and fourth chapters I contend that Randall Kenan's A Visitation of Spirits and Gloria Naylor's Mama Day revise the Exodus trope in order to interrogate 'blackness' as the monolithic transcendence of suffering and the return to a communal African folk tradition. These texts establish the American 'promised land' of the post-civil rights era as a contested terrain on which racial subjectivities can become both naturalized and commodified in ideological narratives of American 'progress.'
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Date Issued: 2011
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-7184
Format: Thesis

Title: American Thunder.
Creator: Manis, Charles, Hamby, Barbara, Epstein, Andrew, Kirby, David, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: American Thunder is a collection of narrative lyric poems broken into four sections according to thematic, tonal, and formal patterns and tied together as one manuscript by its speakers' concerns with community, violence, embodiment, grief, ecstasy, and the possibilities of intimacy. These narrative lyric poems frequently present the reader with the basic elements of story--character, conflict, and place--but also progress at times through non-narrative means like imaginative leaps triggered...
Show moreAmerican Thunder is a collection of narrative lyric poems broken into four sections according to thematic, tonal, and formal patterns and tied together as one manuscript by its speakers' concerns with community, violence, embodiment, grief, ecstasy, and the possibilities of intimacy. These narrative lyric poems frequently present the reader with the basic elements of story--character, conflict, and place--but also progress at times through non-narrative means like imaginative leaps triggered in the speaker by image associations or sonic links. Several poems also begin with circumstances made possible through its characters' irrationality but have a speaker who is more than able to borrow the voice of reason. As suggested by the title, the manuscript is frequently concerned with American landscapes. The final section, An All-American Murder Story, presents a young speaker and his community dealing with the considerable aftermath of a mother's murder of her three adolescent children. This section attempts to dig into issues of grief, violence, and voyeurism as they present themselves in this particular rural setting and under these circumstances. Similarly, numerous poems about baseball that appear in the manuscript contrast the images of pastoral life conjured by both the aura of baseball and by the American small-town with the harsher and more idiosyncratic experiences of the individuals in each poem. The first section, The Electro-Mag Lab Rag, finds its young adult speakers in more urban environments and struggling with the challenges of starting an adult life with another person. The poems in each section are ultimately connected more by theme, tone, and form than by place, though. The first section, The Electro-Mag Lab Rag, contains poems that make the most use of dream logic and that present a tense but very energetic struggle for and against intimacy between two lovers, and the poems are often spread across the page horizontally as well as vertically; white space is most abundant in this section. The second section, Metamorphoses, contains a number of monstrously embodied poems spoken by people voicing identity often in conflicting and irrational ways while the form mimics the look of the argumentative and narrative traditions within poetry as they adopt a medium-length line and proceed down the page in the look of a column. The third section, The Red Bicycle, typically adopts a longer line and is, in many ways, the most consistently narrative set of poems as it addresses conflicts present to adolescent speakers. Finally, An All-American Murder Story, shits bag and forth between narrative and lyric modes and makes use of a variety of flexible forms including pseudo sonnets, wide column-like narratives, and the fluid forms that spread across the pages of the first section of the manuscript.
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Date Issued: 2012
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-6436
Format: Thesis

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

Title: And the Hills Burned.
Creator: Umeozor, Obiomachukwu Calvin, Winegardner, Mark, Stuckey-French, Elizabeth, Howard, Ravi, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: Set sometime in 2002, And the Hills Burned tells the story of Chidi, a boy whose father – former Minister of Petroleum in the Nigerian Military administration of the early 90s, and current environmental activist – runs afoul of the military regime that had taken control of the country by the end of the 20th century. The family has no choice but to seek asylum in the States, three years after Chidi’s mother had died in a freak accident. But after six years of a relatively peaceful life in...
Show moreSet sometime in 2002, And the Hills Burned tells the story of Chidi, a boy whose father – former Minister of Petroleum in the Nigerian Military administration of the early 90s, and current environmental activist – runs afoul of the military regime that had taken control of the country by the end of the 20th century. The family has no choice but to seek asylum in the States, three years after Chidi’s mother had died in a freak accident. But after six years of a relatively peaceful life in North Florida – and this is where the narrative begins – things start to unravel when Chidi’s aunt comes to spend the summer with them on St George Island. Chidi finds a letter and some documents, all pointing to a jarring truth: that his mother didn’t die that night nine years before, and whatever had become of her has much to do with Marist Academy, a notorious Catholic Missionary boarding school in Eastern Nigeria. Chidi gets to work, setting into motion a series of events that would land him back in Nigeria as an enrolled Marist student spending the holidays with his aunt. It is in Marist that he meets Virginia, and Jonah the only son of the American Ambassador to Nigeria, and everything he thought he once knew about his family and about himself is soon turned on its head. On a thematic level, this narrative explores immigration, and race, and the tyranny of power.
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Date Issued: 2018
Identifier: 2018_Sp_Umeozor_fsu_0071N_14577
Format: Thesis

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

Title: The Annoying Village.
Creator: Jenkins, Ronald, Kirby, David, Rehder, Ernest, Ortiz-Taylor, Sheila, Crook, Eugene, Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: This dissertation compiles poems written between 1996 and 2004. Most were composed in 2003 and 2004 employing surrealist generative methods such as automatic writing and textual cut-up improvisations. The collection is divided into four main parts: Flow and Flux, Going Back, Crepuscular, and Within. Generally speaking, the first and third sections attempt to present a state of mind or world view, whereas the second and fourth represent, respectively, a backward-looking and a progressive...
Show moreThis dissertation compiles poems written between 1996 and 2004. Most were composed in 2003 and 2004 employing surrealist generative methods such as automatic writing and textual cut-up improvisations. The collection is divided into four main parts: Flow and Flux, Going Back, Crepuscular, and Within. Generally speaking, the first and third sections attempt to present a state of mind or world view, whereas the second and fourth represent, respectively, a backward-looking and a progressive poetics. Overall, the dissertation attempts to give a fair summation of the author's career as a poet.
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Date Issued: 2004
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-3538
Format: Thesis

Title: Anonymity.
Creator: Whatley, Julian Leslie, Winegardner, Mark, Fadool, Debra, Epstein, Andrew, Berry, R. M., Department of English, Florida State University
Abstract/Description: Anonymity is a novel divided into three partsâ"Halloween," "Anonymity," and "Revenge"âof four chapters each, a total of twelve chapters, each approximately thirty pages long. The four chapters of "Halloween" take place on the afternoon and evening of Halloween of 2005, almost two years after the disappearance of an eleven-year-old child, Grace Mays, in Auburn, Alabama. Warren and Margaret Mays, two years after the disappearance of their daughter, have decided to separate. Warren, who...
Show moreAnonymity is a novel divided into three partsâ"Halloween," "Anonymity," and "Revenge"âof four chapters each, a total of twelve chapters, each approximately thirty pages long. The four chapters of "Halloween" take place on the afternoon and evening of Halloween of 2005, almost two years after the disappearance of an eleven-year-old child, Grace Mays, in Auburn, Alabama. Warren and Margaret Mays, two years after the disappearance of their daughter, have decided to separate. Warren, who teaches American history at Auburn University, has moved out of the house and spends much of his time compulsively walking the streets of Auburn, haunted by his missing daughter. He's begun, through a misunderstanding with a colleague, a recovering alcoholic named Red Hall, to attend AA meetings. In "Anonymity," Warren learns, through the web of relationships in AA, the identity of the man responsible for the death of his daughter. In "Revenge," Warren struggles with his discovery and eventually confronts the man who killed his daughter and the police detective whose job it has been, for the last two years, to find her.
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Date Issued: 2008
Identifier: FSU_migr_etd-1126
Format: Thesis

Title: Another Mona Bone Jakon.
Creator: Sturm, Nicholas, Kirby, David, Romanchuk, Robert, 1969-, Andrew, Berry, Ralph M. (Ralph Marion), Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Department of English
Abstract/Description: The poems in the dissertation manuscript Another Mona Bone Jakon are the formal dispersal and performance of the masculine "I," a subject position these poems embody and pulp as a question necessary to a poetics of radical autobiographical practice. The question is: how is pleasure a form of critique? More specifically, what is a masculine pleasure that refuses to own, to only illuminate? How to write an embodied pleasure that affirms a necessarily difficult joy in consumption, whether...
Show moreThe poems in the dissertation manuscript Another Mona Bone Jakon are the formal dispersal and performance of the masculine "I," a subject position these poems embody and pulp as a question necessary to a poetics of radical autobiographical practice. The question is: how is pleasure a form of critique? More specifically, what is a masculine pleasure that refuses to own, to only illuminate? How to write an embodied pleasure that affirms a necessarily difficult joy in consumption, whether economic, political, sexual, institutional, or intellectual, while also acknowledging complicity with systematic violence and identification with the male face (and body) of our culture's various catastrophes? What is a refusal that maps and coalesces in what it refuses? As a book of intertextual long poems, Another Mona Bone Jakon aims to be an affective archive accumulated in encounter with these questions. A range of formal approaches and styles inform these poems, including modes of lyric narrative and framing complicated by artificiality and digression, radical appropriation/deep reference methods that unframe the space of the poem, experimental translation techniques that seduce portions of the avant-garde canon into contemporary cultural exchange, the inclusion of real and imagined correspondence, and the formation of a prosody textured by broad juxtapositions of tones and discourses.
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Date Issued: 2015
Identifier: FSU_2015fall_Sturm_fsu_0071E_12887
Format: Thesis

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