This collection contains some of the theses and dissertations produced by students in the University of Oregon English Graduate Program. Paper copies of these and other dissertations and theses are available through the UO Libraries.
Huber, Katherine(University of Oregon, 2022-05-10)
Ireland’s long history as a British colony raises questions in postcolonial studies about race, class, and gender that an ecocritical lens helps to answer. Drawing on literature, film, and archival photography and radio, ...
Steele, Alexander(University of Oregon, 2021-11-23)
Before history had christened modernism, the movement had emerged in disabled concepts and forms. It was “degenerate art,” as Hitler infamously put it, before it was modernism. Yet when scholars and many readers examine ...
“Sexuality and the Self” argues against conventional views of early modern subjects as anxious about possible breakdowns of self effected by sexual encounters, showing instead how sex’s potential to radically alter the ...
Bresnahan, Daniel(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13)
From a young age, Helen Keller was accused of plagiarism over her ability to write about the material world. Such critiques were founded on an understanding of language as an abstraction meant to signify a material reality ...
Garcia, Rogelio Jr(University of Oregon, 2021-09-13)
This dissertation argues that the multiple temporalities of the subaltern, the indigenous, and the Anthropocene operate as critique against the homogenous developmental time of the postcolonial nation as constructed by the ...
Attempts to define play have highlighted its complexity, making it a difficult concept to fully pin down, particularly in its relationship to game. However, the focus on transformation and creation remain consistent within ...
“Closed Captioning: Reading Between the Lines” argues that captions are a series of rhetorical choices created by captioners influenced by ideological networks which value specific types of bodies, pleasure, language, ...
The middlebrow has always caused problems. When the term entered the popular lexicon during the 1920s and ‘30s, critics often used it as an epithet to lampoon middle-class readers who were more interested in accumulating ...
When Rebecca Harding Davis’s novella, Life in the Iron Mills first appeared in Atlantic Monthly in 1861, manufacturing cities had already cultivated an industrial appearance through smoky skies, soot-covered landscapes, ...
Screwball comedy was a unique subgenre of romantic comedy occurring in American film of the 1930s and 40s, with an emphasis on fast-paced, witty dialogue, zany physical humor, and strong female characters. This dissertation ...
Bostrom, Margaret(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27)
Despite longstanding critiques of single-issue feminisms—feminisms consisting primarily of a response to particular forms of sexism or specifically patriarchal violence—this model for theorizing and protesting gendered and ...
Schmolke, Vivian(University of Oregon, 2020-02-27)
On first read, “Lift Not the Painted Veil” supposedly instruct the reader to not lift the painted veil called life as it only is a mirage/mirror of reality painted to convince people that it is truth; however, this reading ...
LaRiviere, Katie Jo(University of Oregon, 2019-09-18)
In a debate significant for both its stakes and longevity, medievalists and early modernists have engaged the question of selfhood and argued about its ostensible “beginning.” Scholars on both sides have imagined the ...
In the modern outdoor recreation community (and the $887 billion annually U.S. outdoor industry), there is the concern that outdoor recreationists are “loving our [crags, trails, rivers, summits] to death.” At the same ...
This dissertation asserts that climate change is a narrative problem in addition to a scientific one. I show the representational challenges of climate change to be bound to the complexities of race and nature expressed ...
<i>Make Something Besides a Baby: Race, Gender, and Reproductive Science in 20th Century Black Women's Novels</i> challenges the opposition between literature and science that has obscured the ways Black women write science ...