Scrapbook

The poems in Scrapbook are rooted in memory and the act of remembering. While the poems explore different personas and landscapes, they continually return to the poet’s childhood home: a falling apart 50s rancher, where the domestic and mundane are always accompanied by the bizarre. While the mother tries to make order out of these experiences, the poet becomes the quiet observer, journaling and collecting memories her mother would prefer to silence. Influenced by Elizabeth Bishop, Patricia Smith and Shuntaro Tanikawa, these poems tell stories through colloquial language that understates the strange details of everyday life.

Machtverhältnisse und die Problematik des postkolonialen Blicks in Uwe Timms Morenga (1978) und Gerhard Seyfrieds Herero (2003)

Using a postcolonial methodology within a German Cultural Studies framework, this thesis applies a close reading to Uwe Timm’s 1978 novel Morenga and Gerhard Seyfried’s 2003 novel Herero. Both novels narrate the colonial experience in German Southwest Africa during the 1904-1907 Herero and Nama uprising through the eyes of a German male protagonist. I investigate how notions of the ‘other’ become ingrained in the collective cultural imaginary of a nation and manifest themselves as inherent truths used to justify methods of subjugation. I also examine the conflicts that arise due to the clash between these drastically different cultures in the “contact zone”, a term I borrow from Mary Louise Pratt. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the ways in which the natives’ use of mimicry allows for the creation of a cultural hybridity in which power relations are constantly negotiated and re-evaluated. I also problematize the difficulty both protagonists demonstrate in their quest to abandon the colonial gaze in favor of adopting a postcolonial perspective, an attempt that often appears ambivalent at best.

The Ballad of Ravolo Soto

Set in 2008 Puerto Rico, this novel aims to explore the relationship between constructed masks of personal identity, the increasingly interconnected nature of community, and their confluence in the worlds of politics, media, social activism, and business through a narrative examination of the ways in which three primary characters affect the lives of those around them. Jaime, a meditative young man with a penchant for planes, comes home to find the power shut off and his drug-addict mother gone. His best friend, Yarique, a disaffected stoner with a false sense of machismo, becomes an overnight sensation after an escalating series of violent run-ins with his abuelo’s neighbor. Ravolo Soto, a reclusive pitorro distiller, drinks to keep The Other in check, but takes off into the jungles of Lares, hiding out in his father’s mountain shack, after a violent encounter with the police leaves one officer dead.

Green Circle

The speaker in this collection explores the quotidian experiences of daily life. Often restless, she attempts to find beauty or significance in these occurrences. The speaker looks into her personal history in a variety of locations. Many of the poems are set in Washington DC, California, Massachusetts and South Korea and as such, they explore the intersection of memory and present reality.

Expérience précaire du monde et représentation de la poésie dans La fissure de la fiction et Désâmé de Patrice Desbiens

Diverses œuvres de poésie moderne et contemporaine mettent en scène le rapport à l’écriture d’un sujet lyrique. Une telle problématique trouve une incarnation particulièrement intéressante dans l’œuvre de Patrice Desbiens, notamment dans certains de ses textes des années 1990 et 2000, où elle apparaît avec plus d’acuité. Pourtant, sa pratique auto-réflexive a fait l’objet de très peu de recherches. Afin d’éclairer le rapport qu’entretient Patrice Desbiens avec l’écriture et avec la poésie, ce mémoire s’intéresse à deux de ses textes, soit La fissure de la fiction (1997) et Désâmé, (2005) en accordant davantage d’espace au premier, que je considère comme un texte-charnière dans la production poétique de Desbiens. Dans un premier temps, mon travail présente ainsi la précarité qui caractérise le protagoniste de La fissure de la fiction et, sous un autre angle, le sujet lyrique de Désâmé. Dans cette optique, la figure du poète est étudiée dans La fissure de la fiction à la lumière de la reprise ironique du mythe de la malédiction littéraire et du sens que la réactualisation de ce mythe confère au personnage dans ce récit poétique. Dans un second temps, ce mémoire s’attache à montrer que la cohérence et la vraisemblance des univers mis en scène dans La fissure de la fiction et Désâmé sont minées. C’est à l’aune de ces analyses que peut ensuite être envisagé le rôle d’une poésie qui, en dernière instance, comporte malgré tout un caractère consolateur, en dépit ou en raison de l’esthétique du grotesque, tantôt comique, tantôt tragique, dans laquelle elle s’inscrit et que nous tâcherons de mettre en lumière.

Landfall

Landfall considers the arbitrariness of our attachments to both people and places, while at the same time marveling at the inevitability and necessity of those attachments. The importance of place in these poems, most prominently that of southern Louisiana, is pervasive, and the insistent description of landscape becomes inextricable from an interrogation of personal and familial relationships. The power of such bonds seems to defy any satisfactory explanation, but by drawing on personal narrative as well as on the natural world, these poems begin, cautiously and in fragments, to approach and confront that power.

My Four Thousand Bibles

This collection exhibits the relationships between generations of mothers and daughters that are often frayed by misgivings about each others’ perspectives and situations. My Four Thousand Bibles is an emotive critique of ideologies that yield these generational problems, while it embraces the fluidity of spirit, being both intimate and echoing. The collection traces an arch of disquietude from a pressurized girlhood, which for the speaker bears the inevitable condition of guilt, unknowingness, and loving faith. Complemented by the records of her grandmother from poor Appalachia and by the challenges of love and partnership, the speaker’s understanding of herself and her position in time develops patience as an observer and participator in the world’s larger turning.

A Worldwide History Spanning Genocide for the Sake of Corporate Profit

A Worldwide History Spanning Genocide for the Sake of Corporate Profit is the title of a thesis consisting of four stories. Crosky’s Knife is presented first for the sake of allowing potential readers to embrace a sense of amiable audience engagement and is based on a true story of a veteran of one of the many global conflicts currently raged on behalf of freedom. The three pieces following this feint are reworked versions of stories written from the heart and delivered to machines. As it presents numerous aspects of reality that the average person may not wish to consider, doing so with shockingly casual acceptance of such horror and/or banality, the conscious reception of the duty of engagement and possible appreciation of the text is not advised. Knives, rabid dogs, severed tongues, and a downpour of malnourished Iraqi babies are components intrinsic to the direction of this thesis.

Electracy in Praxis: Pedagogical Relays for an Undergraduate Writing Curriculum

The paradigm shift from traditional print literacy to the postmodern fragmentation, nonlinearity, and multimodality of writing for the Internet is realized in Gregory L. Ulmer’s electracy theory. Ulmer’s open invitation to continually invent the theory has resulted in the proliferation of relays, or weak models, by electracy advocates for understanding and applying the theory. Most relays, however, remain theoretical rather than practical for the writing classroom, and electracy instruction remains rare, potentially hindering the theory’s development. In this dissertation, I address the gap in electracy praxis by adapting, developing, and remixing relays for a functional electracy curriculum with first-year writing students in the Virginia Community College System as the target audience. I review existing electracy relays, pedagogical applications, and assessment practices – Ulmer’s and those of electracy advocates – before introducing my own relays, which take the form of modules. My proposed relay modules are designed for adaptability with the goals of introducing digital natives to the logic of new media and guiding instructors to possible implementations of electracy. Each module contains a justification, core competencies and learning outcomes, optional readings, an assignment with supplemental exercises, and assessment criteria. My Playlist, Transduction, and (Sim)ulation relays follow sound backward curricular design principles and emphasize core hallmarks of electracy as juxtaposed alongside literacy. This dissertation encourages the instruction of new media in Ulmer’s postmodern apparatus in which student invention via the articulation of fragments from various semiotic modes stems from and results in new methodologies for and understandings of digital communication.

Análisis de las percepciones y prácticas de un grupo de profesores del Colegio Manuel J. Calle en la formación de destrezas de comprensión y producción de textos argumentativos de sus estudiantes

La presente investigación consiste en un estudio de caso cualitativo en el que se analizan las percepciones y prácticas de un grupo de docentes que tienen a su cargo la formación de sus estudiantes en la destreza de argumentar. Partiendo de un estudio de campo, se profundiza en la manera como los docentes llevaron a la práctica la enseñanza de la argumentación en las asignaturas de Lengua y Literatura 10 y Desarrollo del Pensamiento Filosófico. Se recoge el punto de vista de los docentes acerca de su trabajo, sus prácticas concretas y las condiciones en las que lo realizan. Condiciones determinadas por los cambios introducidos en el sistema educativo ecuatoriano en los últimos años. Todo esto con el fin de comprender mejor su realidad y los problemas que enfrentan: falta de capacitación, lineamientos poco claros, dificultad para conseguir resultados con los estudiantes debido a niveles deficientes de lecto/escritura, falta de hábitos de estudio y apatía.

Investigating Miami English-Spanish Bilinguals' Treatment of English Deictic Verbs of Motion

This investigation focused on the treatment of English deictic verbs of motion by Spanish-English bilinguals in Miami. Although English and Spanish share significant overlap of the spatial deixis system, they diverge in important aspects. It is not known how these verbs are processed by bilinguals. Thus, this study examined Spanish-English bilinguals’ interpretation of the verbs come, go, bring, and take in English. Forty-five monolingual English speakers and Spanish-English bilinguals participated. Participants were asked to watch video clips depicting motion events and to judge the acceptability of accompanying narrations spoken by the actors in the videos. Analyses showed that, in general, monolinguals and bilinguals patterned similarly across the deictic verbs come, bring, go and take. However, they did differ in relation to acceptability of word order for verbal objects. Also, bring was highly accepted by all language groups across all goal paths, possibly suggesting an innovation in its use.

The Joycean Sublime

The purpose of my thesis is to analyze notions of the sublime in James Joyce’s Ulysses and how the sublime is evoked and presented in Joyce’s work. The present work will examine concepts of the sublime from the Classical and Medieval period, through the Enlightenment, and into the Romantic era to develop my own definition. Placing the sublime in a historical perspective allows me to discover how the sublime is at work through Joyce’s creative use of complex narrative approaches. The beauty of aesthetic perfection was achieved by employing all of Joyce’s artistic faculties. My thesis investigates how Ulysses’ experimental writing technique, unique structuring, and difficult prose created a work of genius which evokes the sublime. By analyzing Joyce’s use of language, unconventional narrative, and ambiguity in Ulysses I will explore how the sublime is aroused.

Post-Revolutionary Post-Modernism: Central American Detective Fiction by the Turn of the 21st Century

Contemporary Central American fiction has become a vital project of revision of the tragic events and the social conditions in the recent history of the countries from which they emerge. The literary projects of Sergio Ramirez (Nicaragua), Dante Liano (Guatemala), Horacio Castellanos Moya (El Salvador), and Ramon Fonseca Mora (Panama), are representative of the latest trends in Central American narrative. These trends conform to a new literary paradigm that consists of an amalgam of styles and discourses, which combine the testimonial, the historical, and the political with the mystery and suspense of noir thrillers. Contemporary Central American noir narrative depicts the persistent war against social injustice, violence, criminal activities, as well as the new technological advances and economic challenges of the post-war neo-liberal order that still prevails throughout the region. Drawing on postmodernism theory proposed by Ihab Hassan, Linda Hutcheon and Brian MacHale, I argued that the new Central American literary paradigm exemplified by Sergio Ramirez’s El cielo llora por mí, Dante Liano’s El hombre de Montserrat, Horacio Castellanos Moya’s El arma en el hombre and La diabla en el espejo, and Ramon Fonseca Mora’s El desenterrador, are highly structured novels that display the characteristic marks of postmodern cultural expression through their ambivalence, which results from the coexistence of multiple styles and conflicting ideologies and narrative trends. The novels analyzed in this dissertation make use of a noir sensitivity in which corruption, decay and disillusionment are at their core to portray the events that shaped the modern history of the countries from which they emerge. The revolutionary armed struggle, the state of terror imposed by military regimes and the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime, are among the major themes of these contemporary works of fiction, which I have categorized as perfect examples of the post-revolutionary post-modernism Central American detective fiction at the turn of the 21st century.

Stephen Dedalus' Search for Identity in Catholic Ireland

The purpose of my research was to explore the interplay between religion and art in James Joyce’s novel, A PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST AS A YOUNG MAN. My aim was to trace the development of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus by analyzing how Catholicsim is an institution that forms him, yet must reject to realize his artistic potential. I researched Joyce’s background to gain an understanding of the exilic experience on the literature. Through the exilic lens, I realized that Catholicism was the predominant influence on Stephen’s need to embark on a self-imposed exile at the end of the novel. Complicating his decision is the fact that he does not stop believing in religious constructs such as heaven and hell. In conclusion I found by following his artistic longing, and turning away from the church he is committing a sin and, as a result, damning his soul.

The Buddhist Coleridge: Creating Space for The Rime of the Ancient Mariner within Buddhist Romantic Studies

The popularization of academic spaces that combine Buddhist philosophy with the literature of the Romantic period – a discipline I refer to as Buddhist Romantic Studies – have exposed the lack of scholarly attention Samuel Taylor Coleridge and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner have received within such studies. Validating Coleridge’s right to exist within Buddhist Romantic spheres, my thesis argues that Coleridge was cognizant of Buddhism through historical and textual encounters. To create a space for The Rime within Buddhist Romantic Studies, my thesis provides an interpretation of the poem that centers on the concept of prajna, or wisdom, as a vital tool for cultivating the mind. Focusing on prajna, I argue that the Mariner’s didactic story traces his cognitive voyage from ignorance to enlightenment. By examining The Rime within the framework of Buddhism, readers will also be able to grasp the importance of cultivating the mind and transcending ignorance.