“Image/Text and Text/Image: Reimagining Multimodal Relationships through Dissociation”

“W.J.T. Mitchell has famously noted that we’re in the middle of a “pictorial turn,” and pictures are playing an more and more natural part in digital and multimodal communication. My dissertation addresses the issue of methods meaning is created when texts and pictures are u . s . in multimodal arguments. Visual rhetoricians have frequently tried to understand text-image arguments by privileging one medium within the other, either using text-based rhetorical concepts or developing new image-based theories. I reason that the connection backward and forward media is much more dynamic, and could be better understood by making use of TheNew Rhetoric ’s idea of dissociation, which Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca designed to demonstrate the way the interaction of differently valued concepts can construct new meaning. My dissertation expands the plethora of dissociation by making use of it particularly to visual contexts and taking advantage of it to critique visual arguments in a number of historic moments when political, religious, and economic factors cause one type of media to become valued within the other: Byzantine Iconoclasm, the late medieval period, the 1950’s advertising boom, and also the modern digital age. In all these periods, I reason that dissociation reveals the way the fortunate medium can shape a whole multimodal argument. I conclude having a discussion of dissociative multimodal pedagogy, applying dissociation towards the multimodal composition classroom.”

“Apparitional Economies: Spectral Imagery within the Antebellum Imagination”

“Apparitional Economies is committed to both a historic thought on economic conditions with the antebellum era as well as an study of how spectral representations illustrate the results of these conditions on local publics and individual persons.

Out of this perspective, the work helps guide you extensively the period’s literature is entangled within the economic: in financial devastation, within the limitations of apparently unlimited progress, as well as in the factors of worth that order the value of goods and also the persons who are able to trade on their behalf. I reason that just the specter is really a pressure of representation, a hidden site where the uncertainties of antebellum social and economic change come into sight. I just read this spectral space in canonical functions by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and Wally Whitman as well as in emerging texts by Robert Montgomery Bird, Theophilus Fisk, Fitz James O’Brien, and Edward Johnson Clay. Methodologically, Apparitional Economies moves through historic occasions and textual representation in 2 ways: chronologically by having an focus on archival materials with the antebellum era (starting with the specters that emerge using the Panic of 1837) and interpretively over the readings of the literary specter (like a space of lack and potential, as exchange, as transformation, and because the existence of absence). Like a unsuccessful body and, therefore, a problematic embodiment of monetary existence, the literary specter proves a effective representation of antebellum social and financial uncertainties.”

Michael Todd Hendricks. 2014

“Knowing and Being Known: Sexual Delinquency, Stardom, and Adolescent Girlhood in Midcentury American Film”

“Sexual delinquency marked midcentury motion picture representations of adolescent women in 1940s, 50, and early 60s. Drawing in the good reputation for adolescence and also the context of midcentury female juvenile delinquency, I reason that studios and teen girl stars battled for many years with publicity, censorship, and social expectations concerning the sexual license of teenage women. Before the late 1950s, exploitation films and B movies exploited teen sex and pregnancy while mainstream Hollywood overlooked individuals issues, battling to advertise teen girl stars by tightly controlling their private lives but depriving fan magazines from the gossip and scandals that normally fueled the machinery of stardom. The emergence and picture of the postwar, sexually autonomous teen girl finally started to determine expression in mainstream melodramas from the late 50s, and teen girl stars for example Sandra Dee and Natalie Wood produced new, “post-delinquent” star images in which “good girls” could be sexually experienced. This new image would be a significant departure in the prevalent thought that the if perhaps you are teen girl would be a essentially delinquent threat towards the nuclear family, and offered a liberal counterpoint to more conservative teen girl prototypes like Hayley Mills, which ongoing to possess cultural currency.”

“Strong Angels of Comfort: Middle-class Managing Kids in Victorian Literature”

“This dissertation joins an exciting conversation within the social sciences concerning the challenging nature of care labor in addition to feminist discussions concerning the role from the daughter in Victorian culture. It explores the literary existence of the center class managing daughter within the Victorian home. With each other, the novels within this study articulate social anxieties concerning the unclear and unstable role of kids in the household, the emotionally and physically challenging work they, and all sorts of women, do, and also the struggle for kids to locate a devote a household hierarchy, that is frequently structured not by effort or affection, but by proscribed traditional roles, that do not easily adjust to managing kids, even if they’re those holding the household together. The managing daughter is a concern not taken into account in almost any conventional domestic structure or ideology so there’s no role, no obvious group of responsibilities with no limitations that may, and perhaps should, define her obligations, leave her with possibilities for empowerment, or set necessary limits around the broad cultural mandate she’s to comfort and care others. The extremes she’s frequently pressed to reveals the stresses and hidden conflicts for authority and autonomy natural in domestic labor with no legendary angel in the home rhetoric that so frequently masks the down sides of domestic existence for ladies. She gains no authority or stability regardless of how loving or perhaps how necessary she’s to some family since there is no position within the parental family structure on her. The managing daughter thus reveals an in-depth crack within the structure from the traditional Victorian family by showing it frequently cannot accommodate, safeguard, or validate a loving non-traditional member of the family since it values traditional hierarchies over emotion or effort. Yet, by doing this, additionally, it shows that if it’s position not passion that means something, then as lengthy like a lady assumes the best position in the household then deep emotional connections to other people aren’t essential for her of looking after competently for other people.”

Virginia B. Engholm. 2014

“The Power Multiplying: Reproductive Control in American Culture, 1850-1930”

“Prior towards the creation of modern contraception starting in the nineteenth century, the biological reproductive cycle of being pregnant, publish-partum recovery, and nursing dominated women’s adulthood. The typical birth rate per lady in 1800 only agreed to be over seven, but by 1900, that rate had fallen to simply under than 3 . 5. The issue this dissertation explores is exactly what cultural narratives about reproduction and reproductive control emerge within the wake of the demographic shift. What’s on the line inside a woman’s decision to breed, for herself, her family, her nation? How can women, and society, control birth? To be able to explore these questions, this dissertation broadens the term “birth control” in the technological and medical mechanisms through which women limit or prevent conception and birth to some conception of “controlling birth,” the societal and cultural processes affecting reproductive practices. This dissertation, then, constructs a cultural narrative of the entire process of controlling birth. Leaving an emphasis on “negative birth control”—contraception, abortion, sterilization—the term “controlling birth” will also apply to engineering or encouraging wanted or preferred reproduction. As the chapters of the work frequently concentrate on traditional sites of birth control—contraceptives, abortion, and eugenics—they aren’t restricted to individuals forms, uncovering formerly hidden narratives of reproduction control. This new lens also reveals men’s purchase of these reproductive practices. By concentrating on a number of cultural texts—advertisements, imaginary novels, historic writings, medical texts, popular print, and film—this project aims to produce a feeling of how these cultural productions interact to create narratives about sexuality, reproduction, and reproductive control. Relying heavily on the historicizing of those issues, my project shows how these texts—both imaginary and nonfictional—create a wealthy and valid site by which to explore the introduction of narratives of sexuality and reproductive practices, in addition to how these narratives connect with bigger cultural narratives of race, class, and nation. The interdisciplinary nature of the inquiry highlights the interrelationship between your literary productions from the nineteenth and last century and American cultural history.

Amber M. Stamper. 2013

“Witnessing the net: The Rhetoric of yankee E-Vangelism and Persuasion Online”

“From the distribution of spiritual tracts at Ellis Island and Billy Sunday’s radio messages to televised tracks from the Billy Graham Campaign and Pat Robertson’s 700 Club, American evangelicals have lengthy designed a practice of employing media to spread the Gospel. Most lately, these Christian evangelists go online. Like a contribution to scholarship in religious rhetoric and media studies, this dissertation offers evangelistic websites like a situation study in to the ways persuasion is transported out on the web. With an analysis of digital texts—including several evangelical home pages, a chat room, discussion forums, along with a virtual church—I investigate how conversion is inspired via website design and virtual community in addition to the way the Internet medium impacts the theology and rhetorical tricks of web evangelists. I argue for “persuasive architecture” and “persuasive communities”—web design around the fundamental degree of interface layout and tightly-controlled limitations on discourse and community membership—as critical factors of the strategy. Additionally, I reason that evangelical ideology continues to be affected by the net medium which a “digital reformation” takes devote the church, one dedicated to a escape from the Success Gospel of televangelism to some Gospel centered on God as divine problem-solver and salvation being an uncomplicated, individualized, and immediately-rewarding experience, mimicking Web 2 . 0. users’ desire to have quick, timely, and efficient solutions to any or all queries. This research concurrently illuminates the structural and fundamental amounts of design by which the net persuades in addition to how—as rhetoricians from Plato’s King Thamus to Marshall McLuhan have recognized—media inevitably shapes the content and culture of their users.”

“Randomness, Uncertainty, and Economic Behavior: The Existence of cash in Eighteenth-Century Fiction”

“My dissertation argues that fiction created in England throughout the frequent financial crises and political volatility experienced between 1770 and 1820 both reflected and formed the cultural anxiety occasioned with a apparently random and more and more uncertain world. The work begins inside the historic framework from the multiple financial crises that happened within the late 18th century: seven crises required place between 1760 and 1797 alone, appearing apparently from nowhere and developing a climate of monetary meltdown. But exactly how did the attention of monetary turbulence filter in to the creative awareness? With an interdisciplinary concentrate on cultural studies and behavior financial aspects, the dissertation posits that regardless of their conventional, established order affirming endings (opportunists are punished, enthusiasts are married), novels and plays written between 1770 and 1820 considered types of behavior which were recently opportunistic, echoing the reluctant realization that irrationality took over as norm as opposed to a rare aberration. By analyzing concrete narrative strategies utilized by authors for example Frances Burney, Georgiana Cavendish, Hannah Cowley, and Thomas Holcroft, I show late eighteenth-century fiction both articulates and elides the attention of randomness and uncertainty in the depiction of plot, character, and narrative.”

George Micajah Phillips. 2011

“Seeing Subjects: Recognition, Identity, and Visual Cultures in Literary Modernism”

“Seeing Subjects plots a literary good reputation for modern Britain that starts with Dorian Grey obsessively inspecting his portrait’s changes and leads to Virginia Woolf’s trip to the cinema where she found audiences to become “savages watching the images.” Finding out how literature within the late-19 th and 20 th centuries considered images as aquiring a shaping pressure over how identities are understood and performed, I reason that modernists in great britan felt mediated images were altering, instead of just representing, British identity. As Britain’s economy expanded to unparalleled imperial achieve and global influence, new visual technologies also made it feasible to render images culled from over the British world—from its farthest colonies to darkest London—to the little island nation, deeply and irrevocably complicating British identity. In reaction, Oscar Wilde, Frederick Conrad, T. S. Eliot, yet others searched for to higher know how identity was recognized, particularly visually. By exploring how painting, photography, colonial exhibitions, and cinema searched for to handle visual representations of identity, these modernists discovered that recognition started by acknowledging the familiar but additionally went further to understand that which was strange and new too. Studying recognition and misrecognition as crucial options that come with modernist texts, Seeing Subjects argues for any new knowledge of how modernism’s formal experimentation came into existence as well as for how it requires responses from readers today.”

Aparajita Sengupta. 2011

“Nation, Fantasy, and Mimicry: Aspects of Political Resistance in Postcolonial Indian Cinema”

“In spite from the substantial quantity of critical work that’s been created on Indian cinema within the last decade, misconceptions about Indian cinema still abound. Indian cinema is really a subject about which conceptions continue to be muddy, even within prominent academic circles. A lot of the recent critical work about them endeavors to fix misconceptions, evaluate motion picture norms and lay lower the theoretical foundations for Indian cinema. This dissertation conducts research from the cinema from India having a view to look at the extent that such cinema represents an anti-colonial vision. The political resistance of Indian films to colonial and neo-colonial norms, as well as their ability to formulate a nationwide identity may be the primary focus of the present study.”

Kenneth Carr Hawley. 2007

“The Boethian Vision of Eternity in Old, Middle, and Early Modern British Translations of De Consolatione Philosophi”

“While this research into the Old, Middle, and Early Modern British translations of De Consolatione Philosophiandampaelig supplies a brief reception background and an introduction to the critical tradition surrounding each version, its focus is upon how these renderings present particular moments that provide the consolation of eternity, especially since such passages typify the job in general. For Boethius, confused and conflicting thoughts about fame, fortune, happiness, good and evil, fate, freedom, necessity, foreknowledge, and providence are just able to clearness and determination as far as that certain attains to understanding from the divine mind and particularly to understanding like this from the divine mind, which alone offers a wonderfully eternal perspective. Thus, because it draws upon such essentially Boethian passages around the eternal Prime Mover, this research helps guide you the linguists have negotiated linguistic, literary, cultural, religious, and political expectations and forces because they have presented their very own particular versions from the Boethian vision of eternity. Although the text continues to be understood, recognized, and appropriated such divergent ways within the centuries, the Boethian vision of eternity has held his Consolations arguments together and undergirded all its most pivotal positions, without disturbing or compromising the philosophical, secular, academic, or religious methods to the job, as readers from over the ideological, theological, doctrinal, and political spectra have appreciated and endorsed the character and also the implications of divine eternity. It’s the consolation of eternity that’s been cast so consistently and thus faithfully into Old, Middle, and Early Modern British, no matter form and regardless of situation or background. For whether in prose and verse, all-prose, or all-verse, and whether with a Catholic, a Protestant, a king, a queen, a writer, or perhaps a scholar, each translation has presented the manuscripts central narrative: as Boethius the smoothness is educated through the figure of Lady Philosophy, his eyes are switched from the earth and in to the heavens, moving him and the mind from confusion to clearness, from forgetfulness to remembrance, from need to intelligence, and therefore from time for you to eternity.”

Douglas Larue Reside. 2006

“The Electronic Edition and Textual Critique of yankee Musical Theatre”

“For many, contemporary theatre is symbolized through the musical. The shape remains, however, virtually unstudied by literary scholars. Partly, this is usually a consequence of the problem of being able to access the manuscripts. Studying a musical from the traditional codex isn’t any easy matter. The combination of text and music inside a musical allow it to be inappropriate to split up the 2. It’s possible to try to check out a cast recording. Generally, though, this really is awkward. Many cast albums record a considerably modified form of the score and lyrics and couple of range from the entire work. Further, musical theatre texts frequently exist in several versions. The work starts with a listing of the issues one encounters when editing a multi-authored text (musicals frequently possess a lyricist, librettist, and composer) which can be revised for practical (instead of aesthetic) reasons. The merits of restoring the fabric altered throughout the production process are debated. Within this discussion some attempt is built to identify who should be thought about the dominating collaborator (or auteur) of the musical. Ultimately, this dissertation argues the perception of attempting to restore an “authorial Ur-Text” makes little sense because of the large number of collaborators involved while making musicals. Rather, a digital variorum edition is presented as a substitute way of studying and teaching musical theatre texts. The research concludes having a narrative from the authors own focus on a digital edition from the 1998 Broadway musical Parade and ends having a critical summary of this text.”