Regional Domesticities: Recalling, Rewriting, and Redefining Gender and Domesticity in the Greater Southwest

Laurie Lowrance, American Literary Studies

Jesse Aleman, Chair

This dissertation examines how Native American and Mexican American women in the greater Southwest negotiated domestic expectations within their own cultures while navigating the demands of encroaching Anglo culture to produce something new: hybrid domesticities rooted in the region, which I call regional domesticities. Chapter 1 focuses on María Amparo Ruiz de Burton and connects her novels Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don to the rhetoric of the Overland Monthly. Chapter 2 explores bicultural collaborations between Native American and Anglo women and focuses on Sarah Winnemucca’s Life Among the Piutes and Helen Sekaqueptewa’s Me and Mine. Chapter 3 examines public preservation through Adina De Zavala’s History and Legends of the Alamo and Jovita González’s Dew on the Thorn and Caballero. Chapter 4 pairs the Sherman Institute with Leslie Marmon Silko’s Gardens in the Dunes to demonstrate how gardens produce hybrid domestic spaces. 

Petal

Jennifer Conn, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

Poetry has long been a method for story-telling. I have implemented prose and poetry to give voice to memoir. Personal photographs and illustrations I created are used in counterpoint to the poems, to exemplify the silences experienced by children who were raised in trauma and how one can move beyond the trauma experience, yet still keeps aspects of that trauma with them in a way that impacts all future interactions of their life. 

Nada Más Que Decir

Darren Donate, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

The following dissertation is made up of a collection of poems concerning Mexican-American labor, socioeconomic distress and transnationality. While the work in this dissertation attempts to understand "brownness" through the lens of migration and marginalization, it aims to present the contemporary realities of Mexican-American peoples. Through a combination of "traditional poetics" (what the author dubs as left-hand margin poems) and "VisPo," the collection attempts to understand the complexity of intergenerational and multicultural relationships in Hispanic communities. The collected poetry is intended to be hyper-regional, concerned with violence that occurs in urban Los Angeles—violence that is sexual, corporeal, and emotional in nature. The author is concerned with how race and culture is constructed (and reacted towards) through poetry. This work includes photographs from the author’s family members in hopes to better understand the obstacles of immigrant experience. 

A Little Bird Told Me: Stories

Amarlie Foster, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

This creative dissertation is a suite of short fiction and essays. This project is an exploration of love and romance, with a pointed interest in how wider cultural narratives about "romance" impact both the author and her characters in their experiences of love and romance. The collection examines what happens when “the Real” brushes up against simulation models, and ultimately asks the question: what is authentic and true, and does the Real exist?

An American Standard

Seth Garcia, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

Thank You, John

Michelle Gurule, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

THANK YOU, JOHN is a comedy-tragedy memoir, following 24-year-old, Michelle Gurule, a queer, wanna-be writer, exasperated by poverty, bad teeth, and the poor choices of her family. With a Chicano father convinced aliens will eventually rule the world, and a White mother who’d maxed out her credit cards to feed her McDonald’s addiction, Michelle turns to Oprah Winfrey’s SuperSoul Sunday episodes for insight, which leads her to believe a sugar daddy arrangement is her density. As John becomes aware of the severity of Michelle’s family’s poverty, he leverages it against her, offering financial security for the lot of them in exchange for marriage and Michelle must decide between lifelong financial security for her and her family or the uncertain path of an artist.

Mothering

Jane Kalu, Creative Writing

Julie Shigekuni, Chair

MOTHERING is a story cycle that focuses on Igbo women dealing with the complexities of patriarchy in their marriages, parental relationships, friendships, sibling relationships, and their environments. It’s a book about longing, about promises made to address this longing, and about the consequences of decisions made based on those promises. The women in MOTHERING live in either Albuquerque or Enugu, one arriving to meet a long-time lover who finally has his papers and can have her join him, another moving to America to find her long-lost brother who disappeared in the 80s. These women are strong-willed and make their own decisions, or at least think they do. 

Charlotte Smith

Heather Johnson Lapahie, Creative Writing

Sharon Warner and Daniel Mueller, Chairs

In this novella, Charlotte Smith, the main character, a gay Dine fifteen-year-old girl, is propelled into prostitution with an abusive older man. In the beginning, Charlotte is kicked out of her mother's home for having a homosexual relationship with another girl, Ava. The two girls try to make it on the street, homeless, together, but fail. Circumstances force Charlotte to resort to prostitution to support them both.

Animal Texts: Critical Animal Concepts in Environmental Literature for the Anthropocene

Lauren Perry, American Literary Studies

Jesse Alemán, Chair

This dissertation examines how key environmental texts from the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries portray animals and the changing conception of animal lives. Beginning with short stories by Sarah Orne Jewett and Jack London, the first chapter examines how early environmentally-minded writers developed animals' independent subjectivity. The second chapter analyzes how Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Sarah Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) promote ecological awareness by paying attention to animal time. Chapter three argues that Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire (1968) develops a layered understanding of animal consciousness. Chapter four contends that Terry Tempest Williams’ Refuge (1991) merges the genre of memoir with scientific writing to chronicle animal memories. Chapter five analyzes Dan Flores’ Coyote America (2016) and Nate Blakeslee’s American Wolf (2017) as examples of animal texts that utilize history, mythology, science, and decades of wildlife watching to create a new kind of literary animal presence that accurately conveys what animals have experienced and continue to experience alongside humans.

The Ego at an Impasse: Aesthetic Empathy and the Abject d’art in Fin de Siècle Supernatural Fiction

Leandra Binder, British & Irish Literary Studies

Gail Houston, Chair

This dissertation examines the symbol of an art object which represents a corpse or dead person’s identity, what I call the abject d’art, as it appears in fin de siècle supernatural fiction by Vernon Lee (Violet Paget) to identify late Victorian notions of Kristevan abjection, avant la lettre. Lee’s aesthetic philosophy informs her use of the abject d’art, especially her examination of the empathetic process as part of aesthetics to explain how individuals represent and respond to objects mentally and emotionally. Through her analysis of empathy, Lee identifies the ego as a fallible moderator of an individual’s responses and judgments towards the external world. Lee’s fiction uses the abject d’art to expose how ego-driven perception results in abusive representations of women and the laboring classes. This project identifies expressions of the abject d’art in Lee’s fiction, tracing her critique of determinism, religion, marriage, and social injustice as sources of abjection.

A Rhetorical Analysis through American Indian/Indigenous Tribal Leadership:  The Rhetorics of Four North American Tribal Leaders

Loyola Bird, Rhetoric & Writing

Gail Houston, Chair

The Ridgeway Ghost

Mitch Marty, Creative Writing

Gregory Martin, Chair

The Ridgeway Ghost is a memoir in essays about alcohol and alcoholism, about the way my father’s alcoholism has affected my life, about the way that generational alcoholism in my father’s family has affected my life, my relationships, and the way I think about myself. It’s about how place and culture can create the ideal circumstances for addiction to take root in a family and never let go. The story told through The Ridgeway Ghost isn’t unique – it’s abundantly common – but through this selection of essays I analyze the culturally embedded mentality of drinking as a staple of life in Wisconsin and the way functional alcoholism can crater a person or a family.

A Boy Named Ariel

Ariel McGuirk, Creative Writing

Gregory Martin, Chair

This creative dissertation is a first-person dramatic memoir. This project is an exploration of grief and longing to connect to a mother who died before the narrator could form memory. It examines grief, family, escape, and home, through an Aristotelian ‘hero’s journey’ story structure that connects with several social issues prevalent in US discourse for the past two decades—including the opioid epidemic, migration between Mexico and the US, post 9/11 conflicts in the Middle East, and economic bereavement. Influences for this project include Tobias Wolff, Alison Bechdel, Mary Karr, Leslie Jamison, and James Baldwin.

First the Blessing, Then the Aftermath

Emily Murphy, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

This collection of poetry explores themes of time, memory, and identity through a lens crafted after a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Novel. Drawing on the author’s personal experiences and history, this collection confronts the reader with the historical implications of their own choices through a structure that compels multiple readings, leading to new discoveries of the interior experience of choice. A pair of choices located at the end of each poem confront the reader with an opportunity to complete the poem as best suits them. Each successive re-reading will result in new iterations of the book’s structure, though the odds of any two readings being identical are vanishingly small. By successively re-reading and re-engaging with the contents of this book, the reader is given the opportunity to re-create a history and by so doing, re-create their own. 

The Magic of Love: Love Magic in Medieval Romance

Dalicia Raymond, Medieval Studies

Anita Obermeier, Chair

This project examines authorial representations of the morality of three functions of love magic: to induce, to disrupt, and to facilitate love in twelfth- through fifteenth-century Middle High German, Old French, and Middle English romances. Using a cultural studies approach with close textual analysis and informed by gender studies, it investigates medieval romance authors’ discomfort with love inducing magic and asserts that this discomfort is a response to the magic’s violation of free will, a central tenet of medieval theology. I find that authors condemn love inducing magic but mark specific instances acceptable through explicit clarification of divine approval. Love disrupting and facilitating magic do not inherently violate free will, and so the morality of the magical practitioner’s motivations is extended onto the love magic. This project provides an understanding of how medieval authors grappled with the morality attached to love magic and how they communicated this morality to audiences.

Mass and Shadow

Rubin Rodriguez, Creative Writing

Stephen Benz, Chair

Mass and Shadow is a book of prose poems centered around the death of a mother and the maturation of a her son. It investigates what it means to be Chicano in suburban California, as well as the toll disease has on family. In the preface, the author presents his poetic aesthetic as well as the themes of the book: family dynamics, disease, religion, and class dynamics. 

Getting to Denver: Instructor Participation in the Design of Standardized Writing Program Assessment Technologies

Soha Turfler, Rhetoric & Writing

Cristyn Elder, Chair

This dissertation presents a framework for writing instructor participation in the design of writing program assessment technologies. I base this framework on a case study into the participation of 16 non-tenure track (NTT) and graduate teaching assistant (GTA) writing instructors in the design of a final portfolio assignment prompt for the first-year composition (FYC) program at the University of New Mexico (UNM). I specifically question how Writing Program Administrators (WPAs) and assessment designers can address the needs, interests, and values of writing instructors in the design of writing program assessment technologies, including the important need for agency and professional autonomy. Relying on Broad's Dynamic Criteria Mapping and Wenger's social theories of community and participation, I present and analyze a methodology for shaping instructor participation in the design process. Finally, I present findings relating instructors' participation to the concept of writing assessment validity. 

Dissonances of Dispossession: Narrating Colonialism and Slavery in Expansion of Capitalism

W. Oliver Baker, American Literary Studies (Mellon Fellowship)

Jesse Alemán, Chair

This project studies how ethnic American literature of the long nineteenth century represents the relationship between the dispossession of lands and lives—the histories of settler colonialism and slavery—and the making of democracy and capitalism in the United States. We often think of this relationship in terms of temporally distinct stages in which the formal equality of democracy and the marketplace overcome and thus leave behind the direct domination of colonization and enslavement. However, I focus on how the early novels of Indigenous, African, and Mexican American writers from the period of manifest destiny to the New Deal era represent the ways colonial and racial dispossession are not overcome by but in fact underpin and cohere liberal democracy and its market economy. I argue that the formal dissonance of these early novels—the way the narrative and aesthetic structures of these works contain irresolvable tensions and oppositions that foreclose harmony or unity in their formal visions or experiences—embodies how the social cohesion, cooperation, and consent required for liberal democracy and the wage labor relation are produced through and continue to depend on Native dispossession and anti-Black subjection. In doing so, they serve as a key literary history or archive of narrative forms mapping a formative period in the history of racial capitalism. These early novels reveal how whiteness and settler sovereignty serve as the linchpins of capitalism. That is, they demonstrate how the violence of anti-Indianness and anti-Blackness generates the forms of unity among settlers that help overcome the contradictions of US capitalism in ways that enable its meteoric expansion in the long nineteenth century when the United States transforms from a settler colony into a settler empire at the center of the world system in the twentieth century. In this way, my project contributes to how we understand race and capitalism. It shows not only how capitalism depends on producing racial, colonial, gender, and sexual difference, but also how the ability for capitalism to expand in the face of its internal conflict between labor and capital is made possible through this unity among settlers generated by colonization and enslavement.

By Talon and By Tooth: Disaster Culture, American Literary Naturalism, and the Aesthetic of (Dis)integration

Vincent Basso, American Literary Studies (Bilinski Fellowship)

Jesse Alemán, Chair

This study demonstrates how American literary naturalism, roughly between 1870-1910, and U.S. print culture more generally, projected an aesthetics of (dis)integration. The term (dis)integration is particularly useful in thinking through the ways traumatic and disintegrative episodes coordinate and integrate U.S. publics. I periodize this work in the turn-of-the-century because it was then that realist literature coincides with the expansion of the national press and new media technologies like photography and film, all of which facilitated the widespread dissemination of crisis narratives, marking the period as the advent of what is popularly referred to as disaster culture in the United States. Through these technologies, I further argue that social and environmental crises underwent a widespread cultural sublimation into entertainment commodities and thereby normalized statist socioeconomic control. I apply the logic of social ecology to critique how U.S. literary naturalism and print culture responded to the naturalization and spectacle of poverty, addiction, racial violence, and natural disasters. My analysis also demonstrates how realist authors represent what I term negative ecologies, diegetic worlds characterized by replicative systems of social and environmental violence. I contend that literatures oriented to social activism only persevere beyond their own ideological constraints when they resist utopian visions and instead effectuate traumatic ambiguities that allow for the creative re-imagining of social futures.

Traveling Light

Tatiana Duvanova, Creative Writing

Daniel Mueller, Chair

The following manuscript contains a novella and a short story collection, accompanied by a critical preface. The novella focuses on three young women who go to China to be foreign language teachers at a Chinese University and, due to a mix up, end up living in the same apartment over the course of one semester. The three heroines come from troubled background and engage in various self-distracting behaviors until they begin to heal and forge their own path in life.

The short stories in the collection deal with various subjects and themes, such as consumerism, environmental destruction, and commodification of women and nature.

Material Matters: Paratextual Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Indigenous Book History

Amy Gore, American Literary Studies

Jesse Alemán, Chair

Material Matters: Paratextual Bodies in Nineteenth-Century Indigenous Book History, focuses on Indigenous authors during the long nineteenth century, from 1772 to 1936, to examine the known “firsts” of Indigenous literature. Starting with the first book published by a Native author and moving to other first entries into Indigenous literary production, I argue that the reprints, editions, and paratextual elements of Indigenous books embody a frontline of colonization as Indigenous authors battle the public perception of Indigenous books and negotiate the representations of Indigenous bodies.

The Chaotic Domestic: Tracing Affect in Representations of Nation, Class, and Gender in Eighteenth-Century Laboring-Class Women's Writing

Kelly J. Hunnings, British & Irisish Literary Studies

Gail Houston, Chair

My dissertation traces a term I call the “chaotic domestic” in the writing of a collection of eighteenth-century women laboring-class writers: Mary Barber, Mary Collier, Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, and Janet Little. The chaotic domestic in the hands of these writers is multi-layered and affect-driven, focusing as they do on issues regarding nation, class, and gender. As both a poetic trope and the seeming natural and dynamic state of the domestic sphere, the image of the domestic that this set of writers represents and defines is turbulent, unruly, and one that deals with the tangled web of local and global, public and private, gendered and classist identity politics. Most importantly, I seek to demonstrate how the chaotic domestic serves as something these writers do to subvert class and gender systems that affect their public and private lives.

Re-thinking the Weird (in the) West: Multi-Ethnic Literatures and the Southwest

Jana Koehler, American Literary Studies (Hector Torres Fellow)

Melina Vizcaíno-Alemán, Chair

My dissertation examines the genre of weird fiction, specifically texts that engage the concept of the Weird West. While authors such as Robert E. Howard and H.P. Lovecraft are often seen as the founders of this genre, I argue that ethnic and women writers, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Ishmael Reed, Leslie Marmon Silko, Lucha Corpi, and others, explore the hidden histories of the West and Southwest in ways that incite a rethinking of the weird. Most importantly, I seek to demonstrate how the weird is not only a literary genre but a literary aesthetic and methodology that women and ethnic writers deploy against violent patriarchy and white supremacy in addition to misleading and dangerous fantasies of the Old West.

Female Protagonist Mega-Archetypes: A Study in Medieval European Romances

Doaa Omran, Medieval Literature

Anita Obermeier, Chair

Despite the claim that structuralism has sung its swan song, my research offers new insights in the field of structuralism through archetypal criticism by exploring four female hero mega-archetypes as narrative structures inspired by the Qur’an and the Bible. These scriptural narratives offer tenets, based on narratives and motifs, that, as structural units, create and identify mega-archetypes. This study posits how, rather than being extensions of existing structuralist taxonomies on the male hero monomyth, the female mega-archetypes enrich that monomythical narrative. This work details the structure of the mega-archetypes Zulaikhah (Potiphar’s wife), Sarah and Hagar, the Virgin Mary, and Queen of Sheba,. A number of medieval European romances, specifically Arthurian, aptly illustrate each of these mega-archetypes and confirm how each crosses culture, time, and race.

675 Days: Stories Queer Kids Tell Themselves

Hayley Peterson, Creative Writing

Gregory Martin, Chair

This is a full-length memoir and cultural commentary that explores sex and gender, sexuality and queerness, and sexual assault and harassment. Specifically, it focuses on how my upbringing in a conservative suburb of Portland, Oregon, with politically conservative, but sexually liberal parents, and the rhetoric of third-wave feminism, forced me to question what it truly means to be a “strong, independent woman.”

The book follows my coming of age as a queer woman. I explore topics such as: porn, BDSM and kink, faking orgasms, consent and coercion, and how faux-empowerment has led to low self-worth for girls in my generation. I also explore the ways in which third-wave feminism has contributed to performative female sexuality and self-objectification, and the ways in which queerness and kink can provide a better framework for sex.

Multimodal Composition and Digital Technology: Investigating the Out-of-Class Experiences of Students in a First-Year Composition Class

Jennifer Morgan Sims, Rhetoric & Writing

Tiffany Bourelle, Chair

This study explores how first-year students in a multimodal composition class use digital technology outside of class to complete their projects. The tendency in Composition studies to characterize students as “self-teaching” users of technology may obscure complex out-of-class experiences, so this study analyzes data from project reflections of 19 first-year students completing digital multimodal compositions to gain insight into their practices. Qualitative analysis reveals that the technical problems students encountered tended to be frequent and repetitive, and some problems were exacerbated by conflicts between the assignment requirements and the capacity of the technology required. Students tended to use trial-and-error methods in response to problems, and they frequently switched to another program rather than solve the problem at hand. Going forward, instructors should dialogue with students about the advantages and drawbacks of technology, encourage a variety of technology and composition types, and assess projects using technology criteria and with the help of technology-focused student reflections.

Calling All Corpses: An Exmaination of the Treatment of the Dead in Old English Literature

Jessica Troy, Medieval Studies

Jonathan Davis-Secord, Chair

The care and disposal of the dead bodies, an unavoidable reminder of one’s mortality, rarely receives in-depth literary attention. In early medieval England, the Anglo-Saxons dealt with corpses but seldom discussed the undertaking in written documents. Instead they focused on the grandiose deeds of heroes like Beowulf and the holy lives of revered saints.

This dissertation examines various genres of Old English literature to identify times when authors discuss corpses and to what end these discussions led. Hagiographers, for example, describe the corpses of certain saints such as Æthelthryth and Edmund at length while the bodies of other saints are virtually ignored post-mortem. Their burials, such as that of Cecilia, may be only one half-line in length while the description of Æthelthryth’s corpse includes burial, exhumation, discovery of incorruption, and reburial. Her dead body receives almost as much attention as does her living body. Both women uphold their chastity and virginity throughout their lives, but it is only Æthelthryth’s corpse which receives attention. Edmund’s dead body is also given great attention, but his purity is not of primary concern. In my dissertation, I examine the discussion of corpses by various authors within hagiography as well as non-hagiographical texts, identify discrepancies in gender and social standing which may contribute to the length of the authors’ discussion, and use the Anglo-Saxon culture as a basis to explain why corpses such as those of Beowulf, Grendel, Æthelthryth, and Edmund take center stage but a battlefield full of fallen soldiers, Grendel’s mother, and Cecilia receive less than two lines of text.

Multilingual Writers and Online Instruction: Expanding Our Theoretical and Instructional Frameworks

Mariya V. Tseptsura, Rhetoric & Writing

Todd Ruecker, Chair

This dissertation is based on a year-long mixed-methods study of linguistically diverse students in one online composition program. It focuses on the experiences of students and instructors from 27 online sections of first and second-year college writing courses. Using student and instructor surveys and interviews, it analyzes how second language writers’ success was affected by the online environment, especially by the issues of technology and digital divide, students’ online identity construction, and the lack of authentic online classroom learning communities. The manuscript provides a broader overlook of students’ experiences across linguistic backgrounds and uses four case studies to offer a detailed, in-depth account of four multilingual students’ paths through their online writing courses. This dissertation provides writing instructors and administrators with recommendations to re-envision online writing courses, mobilizing the affordances of online venues to promote the success of students from all language backgrounds.

American Yogi

Lydia Wassan, Creative Writing

Gregory Martin, Chair

An investigation of the story of Wassan Singh, a spiritualist in the 1920s.

"Enough of Thought, Philosopher!": Emily Brontë's Interrogation of Death

Katherine Alexander, British & Irish Literary Studies

Gail Houston, Chair

The year 1847 marked the appearance of Wuthering Heights on the literary scene. Writing under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell, Emily Brontë soon became known as the “Sphynx (sic) of Literature” following the publication of the culminating masterpiece of her literary career. Although she was not a trained philosopher, her drawings, poems, letters, devoirs, and only novel offer an organic approach to philosophical matters, particularly in her engagements with the meanings of time and space and her interrogations of death.

Surrounded by the pervasive presence of death from her earliest years and beyond, Brontë moved to rigorous interrogations of the afterlife in her writing beginning with explorations of the Bible and organized religion. Not finding answers there, she turned to Nature and the tenets of Stoicism that self-sufficiency, delayed fulfillment, and an afterlife in which the spirit is not restricted to an unfathomable heaven. Ultimately, she envisioned a world where any gap between the spatio-temporal and spiritual could be traversed thus eliminating the barriers between the two realms. The cosmos that Brontë constructs is an immanent space where any divine presence is manifested in the random workings of Nature. The wild moors behind the Haworth Parsonage represented this space, both literally and metaphorically. She often features windows to mark permeable barriers between two spaces and powerful storms to move her characters through time and space. Thus, a powerful storm on the moors transports Catherine Earnshaw, Brontë’s conflicted heroine of Wuthering Heights, from the afterlife back to her childhood home where she discovers a male visitor in her ontological space. When he shatters the window glass, she grasps the opportunity to intervene in her own story. This is the extraordinary event that sets the tone for the discussion that features major developments in Brontë’s intellectual and artistic journey as well as her protofeminist and protomodern contributions to literature.

No scholar to date has examined the life and oeuvre of Emily Brontë in this manner. This study offers an enriching exploration of the powerful framework that she constructs in her philosophical interrogations of death.

Body as News

Colby Gates, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

This poetry collection deals with the intersections of sexuality, spirituality, and the physical body. The work is centered in the examination of relationships that range from the personal, intimate, familial, and religious. The poems are often, though not always, confessional in nature. I am interested in exploring tensions between content, form, and style to create meaning. The work in the manuscript balances itself between realms of magic, dream, and physical and psychological reality. My intention with this collection is to evoke a space for psychic reckoning and a sense of human understanding. My hope is that the work resists isolation or separation— and instead provides opportunities for closeness, recognition, and intimate dialectic between the reader and the work.

Accidental Curators

Steven D. Howe, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

The goal of this manuscript is to construct an essay collection representing the various essay styles I enjoy. The essays track the narrator from childhood to adulthood through various situations, while coalescing around the theme of how memory and experience of youth impact decisions and actions later in life. I show how memory is translated into action, how we choose to ignore/fight some memory and experience, but embrace others when it comes to important moments in our lives, such as confronting social issues, addressing insecurities as a parent, dealing with grief and loss, etc.

Several essays are connected by the thread of growing up in poverty with an estranged, alcoholic father, and how these memories influenced my approach to fatherhood. My father was mostly absent growing up, but the moments we were together were often defined by emotional abuse toward my mother, my siblings, and me. In addition to family issues, I delve into social justice themes, such as poverty, racism, and LGBTQ acceptance. Regardless of the subject, all essays dip back and forth between childhood and adulthood and contain memories and/or experiences reflected upon by the adult narrator. Even in the more research-based work, this reflection is present. In keeping with the thematic preoccupation of memory, I experiment with multiple forms of the essay; traditional, segmented, research-based, etc.

Material Culture in Religious Narratives of the Old English Exeter Book

Justin Larsen, Medieval Studies (Bilinski Fellowship)

Jonathan Davis-Secord, Chair

The term “material culture” represents many different approaches and schools of thought across multiple academic disciplines, but its place in the study of medieval literature is particularly difficult to ascertain. The long tradition of simply using the archaeological record to “fill in” gaps left in the textual historical record does little to expand our understanding of the place that these objects actually occupied in the users’ daily lives, nor does it allow us to make greater connections between the texts, their audiences, and their broader environment. Likewise, the role of the text and its reception has a great deal to do with the physical attributes of the object in which that text is recorded. An examination of this intersection of text and object can thus provide us with a clearer picture of daily life and thought in pre-Conquest England

This dissertation examines the ways in which references to objects of material culture are used in the context of the first five poems of the Old English Exeter Book, as well as the impact of the Book as a physical thing upon the poetry. After establishing a list of twenty categories of material culture derived from the text of the Exeter Book itself and assigning each reference to material culture to one or more of these categories, the larger patterns of usage become visible, making apparent the thematic and structural functions of such references. Likewise, by examining the physical nature of the Exeter Bookand the roles it has played throughout its millennium of history, we gain insight into the ways in which the Book was valued and used. Taken together, twenty-first-century readers can use this analysis to gain a greater understanding of the importance of things in the context of pre-Conquest England, perhaps even including the purpose for which the Exeter Book was assembled.

Sunshine '89

David O'Connor, Creative Writing

Daniel Mueller, Chair

Sunshine ’89 is a coming-of-age-novel, set in Canada in 1989, this creative work explores the travel of a young adoptee from a remote outpost to the bourgeois center of the country in order to pursue a life in the theatre. What ensues is a mentor-apprentice story exploring art, race, sexuality, performance, aging, dementia, alcoholism, politics, Canada, and other theme. Above all, a page- turner and picaresque romp meant to entertain and challenge.

Holy Body, Holy Place: The Veneration of St. Swithun from the Old Minster to Winchester Cathedral

Abigail Robertson, Medieval Studies (Bilinski Fellowship)

Jonathan Davis-Secord, Chair

By considering the way that medieval people would have responded to the hagiography, relics, and shrine of St. Swithun based on their experience as readers and pilgrims, this project will survey the rationale behind the veneration of a saint whose life was largely unknown yet who was ardently beloved and honored in death. That there is not any book-length scholarship dedicated to St. Swithun or his cult aside from Lapidge’s edition, The Cult of St. Swithun, further demonstrates the way that this project will fill a gap in scholarship about the history and sociocultural relevance of this still-famous saint. My dissertation paints a picture of how St. Swithun’s afterlife affected the ecclesiastical communities at Winchester and how the cult of the saint developed and changed in Winchester and beyond through the end of the medieval period. By considering this, I argue that the architectural features of the original Saxon cathedral, the Old Minster (particularly after the cathedral was rebuilt in the late-eleventh century), and eventually the Norman Winchester Cathedral compelled visitors to the saint’s shrine to reenact Swithun’s translatioand thus fundamentally connected Winchester as a locusto Swithun’s virtusin an experiential way; as a result, pilgrimage to Winchester was a necessary component for any medieval person who aspired to venerate Swithun.

Triangle: A Novella with Stories

Faerl Torres, Creative Writing

Daniel Mueller, Chair

This novella and short story collection is a work of fiction, which addresses themes of love, loss, loyalty, friendship, fidelity, and self-discovery. The main novella, Triangle is a coming of age story that follows Francis, the protagonist, as he struggles to break from his childhood relationships and the role he's occupied and to decide who he wants to be on his own. "Peeling Doves" is a story about lost innocence as two young sisters face off with malice for the first time. "Strawberry Harvest" is a story about Ava, a woman who is counting on her transition into motherhood to escape from the purposeless life she detests. When she begins to miscarry her baby she must find hope within herself. "Batman" is a story about Bruce, a young man choosing to reveal the truth of his abusive childhood and shed light on the past he's tried to keep shadowed.

Raised by the River

Crystal Zanders, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

Raised by the River is a collection of poems exploring the themes of historical trauma, family dynamics, racial tensions, child abuse, and education. Several poems explore the culture and history of the Deep South with an emphasis on Mississippi. Slavery is also a recurring theme as well as the vestiges of it that continue to plague the South in the form of racism and poverty. Parents and grandparents play a large role as well. The collection ends by exploring complicated grief and the maturation that occurs after loss.

Neither Surrogate Nor Complement: The Long Life of Visual Narratives

Ann L. D'Orazio, British & Irish Literary Studies (Bilinski Fellowship)

Jonathan Davis-Secord, Chair

Visual narratives are contested territory. They require tools from a variety of academic disciplines, and they defy the usual sets of interpretive strategies and systems of nomenclature in traditional humanities disciplines. This dissertation fills in one of the missing approaches to visual narratives; that is the long historical, interconnected view that renders visible significant connections among graphic narratives from the medieval manuscript to the contemporary comic book and graphic novel. The project articulates a theory of the long material and cultural life of visual narratives in a variety of media forms, including the manuscript, the early printed book, the lithograph series, and the comic book. The project records and embraces the preponderance of narrative images in a variety of media forms, and in doing so, argues that visual narratives are both typical methods of storytelling, and that their ubiquity has been used to create and disseminate narratives to larger groups of the public rather than small coterie groups. The typically popular and topical, and sometimes didactic nature of visual narratives makes them especially suited to a sort of populist politics even before the introduction of print and the advent of postindustrial mass culture. This project advances an understanding of all producers of visual narratives as laborers in a persistent mechanism of collective production, which remains present throughout all of the media examined in the dissertation.

The dissertation covers a temporally wide range of materials not only to prove the pervasiveness and intelligibility of narrative images across a variety of eras and media forms, but also to demonstrate repeated, often recursive, patterns of making and dissemination common to these different periods and forms. The geographic and cultural range is not as wide, owing much more to the time and space limitations of the dissertation rather than anything else. The project examines commonalities not to make a flattening gesture, but to reverse the institutional tendency of literary studies to undervalue or ignore typical, common works.

Invention, Integration, and Engagement With/In an Engineering Student Organization

Brian Hendrickson, Rhetoric & Writing

Charles Paine, Chair

This dissertation draws from a three-year study of writing and rhetorical engagement in an engineering student organization at a university in the southwestern United States. I describe how students in the organization use writing to undertake a water quality program in an indigenous territory in Bolivia. I describe the student organization as a boundary-zone activity between its parent organization, the college of engineering, and its community and non-governmental organization partners. I provide a narrative of the organization as a site of rhetorical engagement, from the beginnings of the water quality program in 2007, through a 2014 partnership with a capstone design course in civil engineering, to a 2015 assessment trip to Bolivia. Employing expansive developmental research, an interventionist methodology derived from cultural-historical activity theory, I analyze observation notes, interview transcripts, and textual artifacts. The textual artifacts include the student organization’s correspondence, reports, field books, journals, promotional materials, websites, and informational architecture. I also analyze curriculum maps, the capstone course’s syllabus and assignment guidelines, and all of the correspondence and assignment drafts produced by the capstone team. I describe the manner in which writing both requires and facilitates the internalization of social motive, or a conceptualization of the contradictions within an activity system and between it and its neighbor activities. This conceptualization functions in effect as a recognition of rhetorical exigence. I further describe how students, faculty, and professional engineers must internalize the need to vertically and horizontally integrate the boundary-zone activity of the student chapter through explicitly intentional dialogic writing activity. Through my research, I work with the students to reinterpret obstacles as opportunities for building partnerships across and beyond the curriculum toward a more holistic approach to rhetorically engaged learning aligned with the aims of a twenty-first century liberal education. Based on my findings, I recommend that even within a curricular environment not immediately amenable to vertical and horizontal integration, the associated contradictions can be treated as exigences for writing-intensive, rhetorically engaged learning.

The Price of Admission

Catherine Hubka, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

This work of creative non-fiction is a memoir of the writer’s experiences as a recovering alcoholic who, early in recovery, became involved with a married man in Alcoholics Anonymous while she herself was married, sparking a marital, mid-life, and identity crisis. The protagonist proceeds to break numerous taboos, both within the program of Alcoholics Anonymous and within society, leading to unhealthy enmeshment with the married man and further disillusionment with herself. Two years into her recovery, one of her children dies tragically. Her grief over the loss of her son further alienates her from both family and herself until finally, she finds herself broke, isolated and homeless. Her next move is transgressive, but paradoxically liberates her from the unhealthy entanglement with the married man and becomes a vehicle not only back to her family, but also to herself.

The Magic Weave, A veil is also a weave

Paula Hughson, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

The author introduces her poems and illustrates her development as a poet, somewhat later in life, drawing from her early experiences in the Caribbean. A central thesis is the author’s conviction, based on experience, that it is possible to arrive at beauty and clarity of thought, even when departing from a painful place of perceived imperfection. Emphasis is placed on the translations such as between chaos and order and between the author’s Spanish culture an Spanish language and her English medium of communication. The author illustrates aspects of theme, form, language and sound, how poems think, in her poems, contrasting also with the works of other poets who have been major influences, particularly William Carlos Williams and Kay Ryan.

Storyless: A Memoir

Ana June, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

In May 2002, during an argument with my fiancé, Chris, about a small amount of money, I punched a wall and broke my hand. In that one moment of overwhelm I was angry, but even more than that I felt somehow disconnected from myself. I felt, paradoxically, as though I was not actually the one driving my fist into the wall. I’d never been good at handling conflict; nearly every time I became embroiled in an argument I had a sensation that the floor was opening up beneath me and that I was floating away. But when I punched the wall I also felt something I couldn’t wrap my head around until much later: I felt entirely “storyless.” At the time I understood this feeling primarily by what had happened thirteen months earlier, when my husband Malcolm went home with another woman after work. But when I started following the threads backwards, I found so much more. In this work, I excavate the effects of my parents' divorce, a variety of abusive high school relationships, rape, and abortion. I explore what it means to become a mother in the aftermath of trauma, and then survive the end of my first marriage that fell to pieces under the very same roof where my parents’ marriage ended.

In the end, I learn that I was never storyless at all, but that I had to find my own voice so I could stop lifting away from myself, seal up the earth beneath my feet, and tell my story on my terms.

Under the Rainbow

Celia Laskey, Creative Writing

Daniel Mueller, Chair

Big Burr, Kansas, is the most homophobic town in the USA. As Under the Rainbow opens, a task force arrives to try to change that. A clash of cultures follows, forcing the characters to see themselves and their world in new ways.

Each chapter is written from a different character’s point of view—some from the town, some from the task force. As the book progresses, characters reappear and intersect in ways that illuminate more about them. For example, one story is about a task force member whose cat is kidnapped by their neighbor. A later story explores a deep friendship between the aforementioned task force member and an elderly Big Burr woman living in a nursing home. Under the Rainbow runs the gamut from gravity to levity, from desperation to hope, showing the universality of each person’s experience.

From the Kingdom of the Lost

Lawrence Reeder, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

From the Kingdom of the Lost is a collection of poems where the speaker examines his memories associated with his father’s stage four cancer diagnosis that leads to his eventual death.

Throughout the book, a boy character appears and serves as a stand-in for where memory and emotion have been distorted by the trauma of the father’s decline. The interaction between the boy character poems and the dying father poems drives the narrative forward. Additionally, there are contemplative poems that serve to assess the personal beliefs and identity of the speaker. By the end, the speaker has assessed how the grieving process is affected by trauma, religious devotion, and social disparities.

n between the boy character poems and the dying father poems drives the narrative forward. Additionally, there are contemplative poems that serve to assess the personal beliefs and identify of the speaker. By the end, the speaker has assessed how the grieving process is affected by trauma, religious devotion, and social disparities.

West by Midwest

Lucas Shepherd, Creative Writing

Daniel Mueller, Chair

His family died in a car accident, but the vehicular mayhem of demolition derby still attracts former aircraft mechanic Sid Rivers. Rules of the road change on the track: you must crash. In between county fair derbies, Sid hunts for the hit-and-run driver who killed his family, but everything changes the night he gives a ride to the wrong hitchhiker: Eden, a recovering meth addict on the run. With her in tow, Sid must dodge a crucible of crooked cops, ex-football stars, and a taxidermist who doesn’t limit his work to the animal kingdom. Just before Sid ditches his troublesome new passenger, he learns she may hold the key to his past. But with everyone gunning for them, will he survive long enough to learn who killed his family? And will the answer help mend his life or cause a deeper spiral? After all, crashing cars is easier than putting them back together... West by Midwest, a neo-Western crime thriller, explores regret, guilt, and second chances in a land where war comes second nature and peace must be wrestled to the ground.

Devilish Leaders, Demonic Parliaments, and Diabolical Rebels: The Political Devil and Nationalistic Rhetoric from Malmesbury to Milton

Karra Shimabukuro, British & Irish Literary Studies

Anita Obermeier, Chair

Throughout its history, England and its writers have created its national identity out of thin air. Some writers such as William of Malmesbury and John Milton have consciously constructed their imagined Englands, while other authors during the medieval and early modern periods are subtler, but whose works reflect the historical and cultural moment, the fears, desires, and anxieties about kingship, tyranny, heirs, and stability, that existed during that time. Little scholarship has focused on the devil’s role in these constructions, his political nature, and how this nature is used in constructing nationalistic arguments. This devil can lead kings, nobles, and clergymen astray, resulting in devilish leadership, as seen in Malmesbury’s Gesta regum Anglorum but devils can be humans who act as devilish leaders, as seen William Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV and Macbeth. Part of the danger of human devils is that they reflect fears that the threat, the devil, could be anyone. Þe Deulis Parlement and Paradise Lost both feature actual devils, who counter the authority of God and his structures, tempt others with their demonic speech, attempt to create their own demonic structures, and incite rebellion. It is worth noting that while Chapter One focuses on threats to the nation, as does Chapter Four, Chapters Two and Three construct the demonic as the people and structures who counter the power structure and authority of the monarchy, not the collective of the people.

Every Last Bad Time

Jason Thayer, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

This memoir investigates themes of loss and adjustment, the ways in which we recalibrate in the wake of grief. After losing his father at seven years old, and then two of his best friends in car wrecks later in life, our narrator searches for closure, for ceremony that might make sense out of every last bad time.

Embodying the West: A Literary and Cultural History of Environment, Body, and Belief

Julie Williams, American Literary Studies (Bilinski Fellowship)

Jesse Alemán, Chair

My dissertation challenges the dominant narrative identity about Western embodiment and opens the field of Western literary studies as it explores what the West looks like to women writers for whom it is not a space of regeneration through violence. I argue that women’s writing reconceptualizes Western literature, creating a counter-narrative about American identity by shaping a space for and a discourse about the embodied experiences that have been marginalized, silenced, and ignored. Through examining discourses of health and embodiment in women’s writing about the American West from the 1880s to the present day, my study brings together a diverse archive of narratives about bodies that have been excluded from cultural conceptions of the West: women with non-normative gender and sexual identities, American Indian women writers, atomic protestors and atomic beauty queens, and people with disabilities. My project drafts a new paradigm as it thinks of embodiment in the West, one that recognizes the body as both a physical object and a political one, and argues that the physical body holds meaning for the republic and its values. I focus on the tactics of storytelling and community building to disrupt dominant narratives that limit perceptions and representations of Western embodiment and what meanings that holds in our culture. The chapters are organized around themes that drive different manifestations of embodiment: alternative models of gender and sexual expression in chapter one, how the negotiation of language creates new modes of belonging in the stories of American Indian women’s embodied experiences in chapter two, the move from the West as a space of nuclear pageantry to one of protest in chapter three, and expressions of disability that push back against an ablest view of the West in chapter four. Chapters are not ordered chronologically; rather, they present different topics of embodiment and follow these threads through time to tease out the changing cultural landscape of Western embodiment. “Embodying the West” addresses a blind spot in Western literary and cultural history as it constructs an alternate genealogy of writers to make legible non-normative conceptions about the West and the bodies that inhabit it.

On Leaving

Charles Wormhoudt, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

The following book of poems is broken into four sections themed on air travel to reflect the manuscript’s title and primary preoccupation: leaving, for better or worse, and the ensuing journeys. The sections are “Departure,” “Baggage,” “Layover,” and “Arrival.” Inherent in this structure is also something of a narrative arc—a classical story structure that suggests continuity (of plot or character) and change. It is a book of lyric poems, however, and so it resists conforming entirely to the narrative mode, even as it embodies the questions at the heart of its structure: what causes one to leave a person or place, when is it time to, and who or what is left behind? What changes in the process of leaving? Where does one end up, and can one return home?

From Recovery to Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction and (Re)Creating the Future

Daoine Bachran, American Literary Studies (Mellon Fellowship)

Jesse Alemán, Chair

My project assesses how science fiction by writers of color challenges the scientific racism embedded in genetics, nuclear development, digital technology, and molecular biology, demonstrating how these fields are deployed disproportionately against people of color. By contextualizing current scientific development with its often overlooked history and exposing the full life cycle of scientific practices and technological changes, ethnic science fiction authors challenge science’s purported objectivity and make room for alternative scientific methods steeped in Indigenous epistemologies. The first chapter argues that genetics is deployed disproportionally against black Americans, from the pseudo-scientific racial classifications of the nineteenth century and earlier through the current obsession with racially tailored medicine and the human genome. I argue that the fiction of Octavia Butler, Tananarive Due, and Andrea Hairston reveals the continuing scientific racialization of black Americans and complicates questions of humanity that still rise from genetic typing and medical testing. Chapter 2 interrogates the nuclear cycle, revealing what has been erased—the mining of uranium on the Navajo Nation, nuclear testing on Paiute and Shoshone land in the United States, similar tests on Indigenous soil in Kazakhstan, and nuclear waste buried in the New Mexico and Texas deserts. I contend Leslie Marmon Silko, William Saunders, and Stephen Graham Jones reveal the destructive influence of the buried nuclear cycle on Indigenous people globally, as they posit an Indigenous scientific method with which to fight through their novels. The third chapter exposes how the Latina/o digital divide in the United States elides a more disturbing multinational divide between those who mine for, assemble, and recycle the products that create the digital era and those with access to those products. From mining for rare earth elements in the Congo to assembling electronics in Mexico’s maquiladoras and “recycling” used electronics across the developing world, the novels of Alejandro Morales, Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita, and Ernest Hogan reveal the hidden price of the digital world and demand representation—digital, scientific, and historical. Chapter 4 builds on current discussions of Alex Rivera’s film Sleep Dealer to argue that Chicana/o and Indigenous authored science fiction films reveal how the global harvesting of natural resources has expanded to include life itself and organisms’ interiors. Films and other visual productions by Robert Rodriguez, Reagan Gomez, Federico Heller, Jose Nestor Marquez, Rodrigo Hernández Cruz, and Nanobah Becker predict biocolonialism’s expansion as they create worlds reflecting current practices where life forms become no more than patented, mechanized resources for neocolonial capitalist production and consumption.

Where Birds Go to Die, a Memoir

Daniel Berger, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

This memoir explores the various ways the author has attempted to cope with his father's suicide and his mother's autoimmune diseases, which finally claimed her life after a 14-year fight.

A Guayaba's Heart

Melisa Garcia, Creative Writing

Steve Benz, Chair

A Guayaba's Heart is a poetry collection that is utilizes memory as a binding for the themes of language, family, and Central American landscapes, The poetry collection takes a close look at these themes through a generational lens and gives space to the unveiling of family secrets, the imaginary homeland, and interweaving binaries of language.

Whistle

Brenna Gomez, Creative Writing

Daniel Mueller, Chair

Whistle is a blurred boundary collection of short stories and essays based on my experiences growing up in Walsenburg, Colorado. The eight distinct pieces feature similar characters and overlap thematically across both genres.

Chicana Feminist Acts: Re-Staging Chicano/a Theater from the Early Twentieth Century to the Present

Natalie Kubasek, American Literary Studies (Mellon Fellowship)

Jesse Alemán, Chair

Chicana Feminist Acts intervenes in the patriarchal forces that negate the historical presence and social agency of Chicanas on the stage of U.S. literature by recovering the transformative power of Chicana drama to enact feminist change. I position early playwrights Josephina Niggli, Estela Portillo Trambley and Teatro Chicana, alongside contemporary feminist playwright Cherríe Moraga, as part of the rich and varied history of feminist cultural production in the U.S. that challenges the systematic sexist oppression of Chicanas. My thesis is that Chicana theater stages a series of feminist “acts” that continuously re-stage Chicana subjectivity to resist fixed patriarchal and nationalist paradigms of gender and sexuality. Moreover, I maintain that, since the 1930s, Chicanas have staged feminist acts in theater that challenge dominant and Chicano gender/sex norms by imagining and performing different Chicana identities. The humanistic social scientific approach I take to this project allows the subjects of Chicana feminist theater to create its living history. Chicana theater comes alive through interviews with Chicana playwrights alongside archival investigations of photographic stills, playbills, and theater reviews. As a result, the trajectory of Chicana theater that I trace proves Mexican and Mexican American women have challenged dominant paradigms of gender and sexuality long before the 1970s’ so-called first wave of Chicana feminism. My research shows that theater has always played a transformative role in advancing the social position of Chicanas to enact social change.

Thieves' Nest

Kathryne Lim, Creative Writing

Lisa Chavez, Chair

Thieves' Nest is a poetry collection bound by themes of separation, detachment, landscape, and displacement. The collection is divided into three sections that mark different phases of the speaker's life, as experienced primarily through the speaker's relationship to place.

"I Heard the Same Thing Once Before": Intertextuality in Selected Works of Evelyn Waugh

Janelle Lynn Ortega, American Literary Studies

Stephen Benz, Chair

Through the lens of structural intertextuality, this dissertation reveals the significance of literary allusion in some of Evelyn Waugh’s works. It investigates intertextual significance and intent that has, heretofore, been largely bypassed. This study tracks Waugh’s intertextual instances from his earliest novels through his short stories to one of his final works. Waugh’s intertextuality unearths a hope for not only literary culture but also the world at large.

A study of Waugh’s intertextuality uncovers an overarching theme of hope rooted in literary culture. This dissertation begins with an explanation of intertextual theory and the words and phrases pivotal to a cohesive understanding of these findings. It then proceeds through the works chronologically. Chapter One explores the use of Dante and Carroll in the novel Vile Bodies by explaining a deterioration of both culture and humanity while providing a remedy that is literature. Then Chapter Two’s discussion of Malory’s text within Handful of Dust rejects the initial critical reaction of associating pessimism and fatalism with the text. Chapter Three’s analysis of “Out of Depth” and Love Among the Ruins uncovers an intertextual analysis concerning Huxley, Shakespeare and earlier works of Waugh himself that purports the importance of reviving literary culture and reclaiming freewill. Chapter Four recognizes that Waugh’s use of T.S. Eliot in Brideshead Revisited begins to confirm the essentiality of literature for the well-being or the individual as well as the world. The dissertation culminates in Chapter Five with The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold and its emphasis on the personal application of intertext.

Ultimately this dissertation reveals that by way of intertext Evelyn Waugh subtly challenges his readers to improve themselves by looking beyond their own experiences. The deeper he explores the art of intertext the more his texts reveal the troubles of the current age. At the same time, however, as this dissertation demonstrates, his use of intertext not only diagnoses the tribulations facing the modern world but also provides a cure in the form of a reviving literary culture.

On Childhood and Other Sad Things

Matthew Maruyama, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

This manuscript is an experimental and otherwise lyrical autobiography that explores the nature of childhood.

A New and Different Sun

Ann Olson, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

A New and Different Sun is a non-fiction essay collection. Essay themes concern the landscape, ideals, and politics of the American West.

"The Distemper of a Gentleman": Grotesque Visual and Literary Depcitions of Gout in Great Britain 1744-1826

Calinda Shely, British and Irish Literary Studies

Gail Houston and Carolyn Woodward, Chairs

In this dissertation I explore the way in which visual and literary representations of gout in British literature and popular culture during the period 1744-1826 evince anxieties regarding over-consumption, particularly in relation to imperial expansion. I argue that the prevalence of gout in graphic satire indicates a common cultural understanding and perception of upper-class over-consumption of food, alcohol, material goods, and sex that threatens the health of the entire British body politic. These depictions provide a way through which the interests of those outside of the ruling classes can begin to develop a sense of community and subtly articulate a voice calling for an alteration or revision of the unwritten constitution of the nation. In chapters one through three I demonstrate the ways in which examples of gout in graphic satire evidence widespread dissatisfaction with upper-class over-consumption as it affects the nation’s political, economic, and social systems. In chapter four I examine representations of gouty men of the aristocracy and upper gentry in Sarah Fielding’s The Countess of Dellwyn and Tobias Smollett’s The Adventures of Roderick Random; I contend that Fielding and Smollett offer rather more radical and nuanced depictions of this stock figure than those common within the graphic satire of the era. These authors’ representations thus offer greater possibilities for revision of the unwritten constitution structuring the nation and its institutions. In chapter five I argue that Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa depicts Mr. Harlowe as a nouveau riche character representative of the changing physiognomy of the upper classes; his over-consumption demonstrates the contagious nature of immoderation and the tragic effects that it has upon women, who are treated as commodities used to enable further aggregation and aggrandizement.

"The Bellows / of Experience": The Modernist Love Poem and Its Legacy

Stephanie Spong, American Literary Studies, British and Irish Literary Studies

Matthew Hofer, Chair

The vein of experimental love poetry examined in this project takes advantage of the friction generated by charging both form and content with innovation. The troubled relationship between sex and power is knit directly into the long and dynamic history of love poetry, but there has yet to be a published monograph on the modernist love poem and its implications for literary history. This dissertation fills a major gap in scholarship and speaks to the broader social concerns addressed by public discourse on sex, sexuality, and eros. The body of modernist love poetry includes allusions to traditional love poetry—a tradition in lyric extending from the earliest written poems and culminating in nineteenth-century sentimentality—as well as explicit erotic content, satire, polemic, violence, and anxiety. It is not neatly bounded by nation, gender, race, or aesthetic approach, but nonetheless, this project examines the consistent presence and achievement of experimental Anglophone poets working with the genre. My dissertation begins with a series of case studies examining the work of Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, Mina Loy, the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, and Langston Hughes to elucidate love poetry in its modernist form. The project establishes the place innovative modernist love poetry holds in literary history, and casts forward with two chapters, one on Anne Sexton and Robert Creeley, and another on Harryette Mullen and Bruce Andrews, to illustrate how mid-century and contemporary poets have continued to find new ways of re-imagining the genre.

Black Stone on a White Wind

Lynn Wohlwend, Creative Writing

Greg Martin, Chair

Black Stone on a White Wind is a memoir dealing with the aftermath of my fathers suicide and my search to understand who my father was after his death.