English Theses and Dissertations
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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.
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Item Open Access CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE'S TAMBURLAINE THE GREAT AND ELIZABETHAN SCIENTIFIC CONTEXTS(University of Oregon, 1976-06)Item Open Access The Season at Sun River(University of Oregon, 1971-06) Silverman, Maxine GayleItem Embargo Poetry Finding Itself: The Dialectic of Logos and Mythos(University of Oregon, 2025-02-24) Donkin, Michael; Peppis, PaulThis dissertation critically examines the long-standing debate between prose and poetry, tracing its origins to the ancient conflict between mythos and logos. I argue that the dichotomy between prose and poetry is theoretically incoherent, a confusion that has historically obstructed a clear definition of poetry. Through a genealogical survey of lyric poetry’s evolution from ancient prayer and hymn, I demonstrate that lyric emerged as the principal poetic form in modern times due to its profound connection with mythical thought. Additionally, this work explores how the prose versus poetry debate’s incoherence has shaped modern literary theory, with a particular focus on an overlooked manifesto by Virginia Woolf, where she envisions a novel that synthesizes poetry and prose. Ultimately, I propose a definition of poetry rooted in the concept of “mythical speech,” challenging contemporary assumptions and offering a new framework for critically engaging with poetry in its diverse, ever-evolving forms.Item Open Access Collected Works: 1969-1972(University of Oregon, 1972-06) Levine, Lawrence PeterItem Embargo The Art of Baking: How QAnon Folk Media Turned Crumbs into a Mass Conspiracy Culture(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Selcer, Leslie; Wood, MaryQAnon’s umbrella conspiracy culture operates through a multi-scaled folk media infrastructure constituted by an array of distinct subcultures. Because QAnon offers a broad variety of online subcultures and corresponding internet communities (each with their own flavor of QAnon), this conspiracist movement has been able to attract and unite a wide variety of audiences without necessarily requiring ideological unity amongst them. In their role as lead interpreters, QAnon influencers position themselves as central nodes around which social media networks and distinct QAnon subcultures form. QAnon meaning-making occurs largely through the collaborative process of “baking”, a term which refers to a variety of do-it-yourself media strategies used to interpret, decode, and spread the esoteric messages (“crumbs”) supposedly embedded in the jumbled posts of the anonymous forum user known as “Q Clearance Patriot”. Baking combines long-standing folkloric traditions—such as the collective production of shared symbols, myths, and vernaculars—with the many formats and platforms offered by social media in order to advance QAnon narratives. QAnon incorporates many pre-existing vernaculars and narratives from both online and offline extremist cultures. First appearing on the infamous /pol/ (“politically incorrect”) board of the anonymous internet forum 4chan, QAnon’s lore draws heavily upon tropes from right-wing internet forum cultures, as well as centuries-old white supremacist myths. QAnon claims to offer truths about widespread abuses of power, while also misdirecting critical attention away from systemic analysis of historical and material configurations of power/domination. Instead, QAnon primarily advances theories of ontological good versus evil, personified by an alleged secret war between good and evil individuals involved in grand conspiracies. QAnon calls for a “Great Awakening” to the many injustices of the world, while simultaneously undermining the idea that oppressive systems like capitalism, white supremacy, and patriarchy drive many of these injustices. Thus, QAnon defends the ultra-conservative ideologies of hardcore American self-identified patriots (explicitly or implicitly constructed as white/Christian) by reacting against perceived threats of transformation to an imagined vision of the traditional great nation.Item Embargo Obscure Pleasures: Ritual, Pain, and the Black Feminist Imagination(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Stephens, Jiesha; Barter, FaithMy dissertation, Obscure Pleasures: Ritual, Pain, and the Black Feminist Imagination, traces how twentieth- and twenty-first-century black women’s literature and performance generate ways of feeling, inhabiting, and embodying the world through the black feminist imagination. Obscure Pleasures explores black women's creative production that conjures intersecting erotic and spiritual forms of embodied agency. This work draws on a rich array of literary and cultural sources, including Ana Maurine Lara's poetry narrative Kohnjehr Woman, Queenie's performance in the series American Horror Story: Coven, and Erna Brodber's novel Louisiana. My dissertation demonstrates how black women engage the sensory and the metaphysical to intervene in anti-black visual, ideological, and auditory regimes. Using obscure pleasure as a framework, I refer to 'obscure' as a way to name the elusive or uncertain ways black women embody pleasure in spaces saturated in anti-blackness.Item Embargo Multiethnic Intellectual Traditions and Reinvention of America in Early Twentieth-Century Ethnic American Literature(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Jung, Junha; Peppis, PaulThe interwar period was a time when the American community and the meaning of its membership were dismantled, contested, and demanded to be redefined through a series of events, such as the Great Depression, the Great Migration, the settler-colonial nation’s territorial expansion in the Midwest, and the related attempt to consolidate its border in the South. In the context of this dissertation, being American is less a legal-administrative matter of nationality. Rather, it is a set of epistemological conditions that are used to naturalize the boundary called American and to exclude others from it. By discussing the works of H. T. Tsiang, Zora Neale Hurston, Charles Eastman, and Américo Paredes, this dissertation demonstrates how these multiethnic author-intellectuals commonly critiqued the liberal notion of the human defined in terms of the possession of scientific rationality. In response to the specific historical conditions their communities were facing, the four writers drew on their own ethnic intellectual traditions to reinvent the social scientific, legal, and political discourses through which Americanness is defined and imposed. Multiethnic literature formally renders multiethnic communities’ shared critique of the figure of the English-speaking, property-owning man as a model American while suggesting alternative ways of being American.Item Embargo The Texture of Affect: Catastrophic Violence and the Matter of Knowing in Late Twentieth Century U.S. Literature(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Ecklund, Ashley; Wood, MaryDISSERTATION ABSTRACTAshley Ecklund Doctor of Philosophy in English The Texture of Affect: Catastrophic Violence and the Matter of Knowing in Late Twentieth Century U.S. Literature This project addresses affectivity as an epistemological resource and affects as im/material phenomena that are expressed in certain works of literature as accumulating climates pertaining to specific bio-political events of violence. The texts discussed in this project are Charles Johnson’s work of short fiction “Exchange Value” (1981), Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir Maus II (1986-1991), and Karen Tei Yamashita’s novel Tropic of Orange (1997). Through both allusion and explicit content, these works address the allegedly distant catastrophes of the Middle Passage, the Holocaust, and Japanese American internment along with countless other entangled violences through grotesque imageries in the everyday late-capitalist settings of Chicago, New York, and Los Angeles. These earth-shattering and world-bending events are linked to the capitalist system-sustaining structures of our familiar daily routines such as buying a jacket at the mall, going to a country club for bingo, or driving down the highway during rush hour. Putting multiple contexts for different global events together through three texts which are partially set and published in the 1980s-1990s United States has allowed me to show how narratives reach across time and place to spatialize catastrophically violent histories via resonant affective connections; though distinct in terms of context, narrative form, and genre, each text centers capitalism as constitutive for ongoing catastrophic conditions and develops images of affect through the texture of everyday material living conditions. For this project, texturing, in terms of “The Texture of Affect,” is an encapsulation of violent histories into the atmosphere of narrative frames, the syntax of drawn patterns, and prose imagery which work to inscribe affect as tangible, palpable, and mattering in a polysemic sense. With vivid sensory detail, and other text-specific choices in form, these works show the importance of situating global catastrophes outside the concept of one-off tragedy. This dissertation includes previously published material.Item Embargo A Counterhistory of the Ratchet: Black Aesthetics in the New Millennium(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Thompson, Jalen; Ovalle, PriscillaFraming my discussion in the 1990s and early 2000s, my dissertation—“A Counterhistory of the Ratchet”—explores what I term “the ratchet aesthetic” as both an aesthetic language that rejects the politics of respectability and a reading method for redressing performances of Black female hypersexuality and excess in film, television, and music video. In Black southern vernacular, “ratchet” is a term used to describe people and behaviors that are deemed socially deviant. This includes being loud, disruptive, sexually explicit, angry and a host of other non-respectable actions. The term is often used as a way to police the boundaries of respectable Black femininity. Following the work of scholars in hip hop feminism and Black feminist cultural criticism, I argue that Black femme cultural producers adopt excessive performances of Blackness that elicit an expansive viewing experience of emotions, feelings, and beauty and that challenge the viewers’ perception of Black femme expression. Chapter 1 “Preliminary Thoughts on the Ratchet Aesthetic” situates the ratchet aesthetic as an intervention in Black aesthetics. Chapter 2 titled “The Televisual Ratchet Aesthetic” analyzes Martin Lawrence’s drag embodiment of the character Sheneneh Jenkins from the television series "Martin" (1992-1997). By looking at the performance of Sheneneh’s ratchet aesthetic, I argue Lawrence’s performance as Sheneneh undermines the heterosexist and gender specific logic of the series. Chapter 3 titled “The Cinematic Ratchet Aesthetic” uses the 1997 film "Black American Princesses" (or "B.A.P.S.") starring Halle Berry (as Nisi) and the late comedian Natalie Desselle (as Mickey) to investigate the visual iconography of the Black American Princess in American culture. With a creative team including two-time Academy Award winning costume designer Ruth E. Carter and celebrity hair stylist Kim Kimble, I argue that through wardrobe, makeup, hairstyling, and nail art the film immortalizes distinct stylistic conventions of working-class excess in the latter half of the 1990s and progresses a narrative of refinement over the course of the film. Chapter 4 titled “The ‘Real’ Ratchet Aesthetic” looks at the career of the reality television star Nene Leakes from the Real Housewives of Atlanta (2008-present). I explore Leakes' blonde embodiment as a form of ghetto fabulous identity formation. Finally, my coda “The Ratchet Aesthetic in the Twenty-First Century” ends with a discussion of the rapper and reality television personality Sukihana and "baddie" culture to explore the kinds of futurity the ratchet aesthetic offers in the progression of the new millennium.Item Embargo Silence, Intimacy, and the Other: Rhetorical Storytelling in Asian and Asian/American Feminist Writings(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Nadarajah, Madhura; Cortez, JoséMy dissertation, Silence, Intimacy, and the Other: Rhetorical Storytelling in Asian and Asian/American Feminist Writings investigates how Asian and Asian/American women have used storytelling as a form of discursive transgression. I argue that rhetorical studies tend to understand speech acts as something only accessible to those who are formally represented, which implies that those who are informally represented cannot speak. Reading through Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, Cathy Park Hong’s Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning, and Sharika Thiranagama’s In My Mother’s House: Civil War in Sri Lanka, I argue that the discipline’s traditional approach to analyzing speech acts has failed to consider how informally represented communities have always been speaking in silent and intimate ways that are not always legible. Drawing from cultural rhetorics and women of color feminisms, my dissertation traces how Asian and Asian/American feminists have used different forms of storytelling, a speech act in itself, as a means of revising the racial and gendered subjectivities placed on them.Item Embargo Writing the Rupture: Representations of Invisible Disabilities in Contemporary U.S. American Poetry(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Hendrix, Raye; Wheeler, ElizabethThis dissertation examines the intersections of contemporary US American poetry and invisible, or imperceptible, disabilities, seeking to make necessary interventions in current poetic and disability studies. It focuses on a few disabilities that, in addition to being physically invisible, are also “socially” invisible (or misunderstood): deafness; obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD); and asthma and allergies. For each of these disabilities there are outward perceptions of “normalcy” until that perception is shattered by way of interruption, or what I term the moment of “rupture.” In recent years, disability scholars have pointed to the poem as an ideal medium in which to represent disability, citing its capacity for “embodiment,” and as contemporary US American poetry is thus far characterized by its attention to identity, it serves as a fruitful space for this kind of humanistic project. While the poetic canon at large has grown more diverse, disability is still underrepresented, and even in literary disability circles, invisible disabilities are sorely overlooked. This dissertation investigates how these disabilities and identities appear in the space and performance of US American poetry, focusing on the moments at which they cease to be invisible and “rupture” poetic convention. In addition, this project also serves to itself be a rupture in existing disability and US American poetry scholarship.Item Open Access Beyond Binaries: Rediscovering The Fantastic Four through a Multi-Dimensional Lens(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Brambley, Matthew; Saunders, BenContemporary trends in literary and cultural analysis are predicated on a reading practice that reduces their subjects to a binary dichotomy that can be summarized as a hegemonic-versus-subversive discourse where, in the former case, the text promotes and enables the dominance of politically and economically privileged social groups over others and in the latter, the text resists such dominance in its subversive deployment of artistic and literary forms and conventions. Such patterns are especially pronounced in the burgeoning field of comics studies, specifically regarding the superhero comic book. This article attempts to destabilize this dichotomy by demonstrating the inherent overlap of these two reading models. In my analysis of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s The Fantastic Four (1961-1970), I argue that such analyses tend to reduce the narratives, characters, and underlying themes in superhero comic books to mere instruments of dominant cultural norms on the one hand or expressions of radical difference on the other. In juxtaposing diverging analyses, I highlight how such conclusions necessitate a disregard for contradictory evidence, thereby oversimplifying the interactions between these unique cultural productions and their socio-political surroundings while also obscuring other analytical frameworks crucial for a more comprehensive understanding of this material. I assert that the superhero comic book facilitates subversive and hegemonic readings simultaneously, demonstrating this through my close readings of various characters and stories, and conclude by proposing alternative methodologies with which to analyze the superhero comic book. Ultimately, my analysis challenges privileged reading models ingrained in academia and begs the question, “How do we read?”Item Open Access Catholic Poets of the Great War(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Kerr, Mina; Peppis, PaulThe First World War poetry canon has long been defined by the works of Anglo-Protestant, agnostic, officer class soldier poets. Though the hegemony of this canon has painted the war as a faith-destroying event, poetic representations of the war involving and often celebrating religious faith were plentiful. Catholicism was a major religion in countries on both sides of the conflict: in 1910, 65% of Europeans were Catholic, including more than 40 million French citizens, 35 million Italians, 38 million Austro-Hungarians, and nearly 6 million people in the British Isles (Liu, Jenkins). This dissertation traces representations of Catholicism in British Isles First World War poetry across a variety of contexts, ranging from high modernist works to Catholic poetry written for popular audiences. Likewise, I investigate the influence of Catholicism upon representations of the war by non-Catholics, including uses of Catholic imagery by secular poets as well as influences of Catholic authors upon non-Catholic ones. I argue for the incorporation of Catholic First World War poetry into anthologies and teaching materials based on the widespread significance I establish of both Catholic poetry and wartime imagery derived from Catholicism.Item Open Access “Never, Ever, Turn Out the Lights”: Podcasts, Supernatural Personal Experience Narratives, and Folkloric Transmission(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) McNeil, Melanie; Phillips, WhitneyThis thesis examines supernatural personal experience narratives presented in “true horror” podcasts. Through content analysis, I investigate four podcasts featuring supernatural personal experience narratives and compare their modes of narration and presentation, as well as their approaches to gender and place. I argue that the unique affordances of the podcast format allow for the modern folkloric transmission of supernatural experiences and the creation of a parasocial cycle of intimacy between the submitter, host, listener, and the podcast as a whole.Item Open Access REORGANIZING THE FRAGMENTED BODY THROUGH AFFECT: A LITERARY ANALYSIS OF PROSTHETIC EMBODIMENT IN CRITICAL MEMOIR AND SPECULATIVE FICTION(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Elliott, Meghan; Wood, MaryIn this dissertation, I analyze how literature engages prosthetic embodiment and relationsthrough critical memoirs and speculative fictions that explore real and imagined experiences with prosthetics. Using affect theory and dis/ability studies frameworks, I examine the emotional and contextual aspects associated with narratives of prosthetic embodiment and their relationship to genre. By studying memoirs by Audre Lorde, Olga Trujillo, and Eli Clare, along with speculative fiction by Nisi Shawl, Erna Brodber, Ocean Vuong, and Silas Weir Mitchell, I explore a wide range of personal and fantastical approaches to prosthetic modification. In treating prosthetics in literature as both symbols and objects that enable physical, mental, social, and emotional relations, this project aims to extend the definition of prosthesis and expand how we understand the shape and extent of our dependent embodiment. Understanding the social and cultural narratives attributed to prosthetics can provide insights into how individuals experience and navigate their embodied existence, challenge stigmatizing beliefs about the body, and foster a more inclusive medical approach to prosthetic embodiment and dependence.Item Open Access Scratching the Celluloid Ceiling: Women's Labor as Technology in the Industrialization of Animation at Disney from 1928-1945(University of Oregon, 2024-08-07) Mastrostefano, Stephanie; Ovalle, PriscillaScratching the Celluloid Frame: Women’s Labor as Technology in the Industrialization of Animation at Disney from 1928-1945 challenges the pervasive myth that women did not have a pivotal role in animation’s industrial development in the United States. By examining how cinematic technologies, labor practices, and social attitudes about women defined—and sometimes subverted—the shape of women’s labor in animation, I show that the Golden Age of Animation was also a golden age of women’s progress in the industry, arguing that white women made substantial contributions to the aesthetic and technological development of the art form. By naming the whiteness of women working in animation during this period, this project aims to shift conversations on animation's industrial development towards institutional constructions of gender and race that were reified by gendered divisions of labor and occupational hierarchies. This project traces the liminal positions that women occupied in the first twenty years of American animation’s industrialization to locate the social, political, and technological influences that drove hundreds of women to the industry in the 1930s but did not lead to its first mainstream female director until 2013.Item Embargo "I love you more than my eyes": Glimpsing the Oblique in Derek Jarman's Caravaggio(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Basaldua, Josiah; Pyle, ForestReading Leo Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit’s understanding of the visual challenge to logocentric epistemologies presented by Caravaggio’s paintings in Caravaggio’s Secrets against their reading of Caravaggio in film, the biopic Caravaggio by director Derek Jarman found in their monograph of the same name, produces fascinatingly contrary conclusions of aesthetic postulations of alternative relationalities and systems of knowing. Bridging this gap are the very bodies whose irreducibility drives the critique of narrativization read into Caravaggio by Bersani and Dutoit, but surprisingly not extended to Jarman, whose work and life as “Britain’s most up-front and articulate advocate for homosexuality” is profoundly offered in Caravaggio through a similar methodology of irreducible bodily presence. This paper seeks to explore these two different readings of Caravaggio as the consequence of a search for the noncoercive image, the mark of its critique of epistemology being its very ineffability.Item Embargo Tracing Lines: A Personal Investigation Into Yaqui Storytelling, Displacement, and Belonging(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) San Juan , Annalise; Brown, KirbyThis project uses fracture as a framework to analyze and visualize the devastation that settler colonialism has wrought on Indigenous communities, specifically through the history of Yaqui people, my ancestors. Utilizing Yaqui history and stories, I frame Indigenous storytelling as a critical method to (re)write oneself out of and beyond the fractures in order to (re)claim the losses, gaps, and absences through an intentional tracing of the lines left behind by family, ancestors, stories, violences, and ghosts. In order to further disrupt institutional violences and conventions and (re)claim a voice and story beyond them, I have interrupted scholarly writing with various creative forms, such as narrative and poetry, as well as family archives in the form of letters, photos, and, essentially, my father’s memoir.Item Embargo Wash Yourself White: Race, Hygiene, and Environmental Justice in Twentieth-Century U.S. Multi-Ethnic Women's Working-Class Literature(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Galentine, Cassandra; Wald, SarahMy dissertation argues that studying literary representations of women’s labor helps us to understand the intersection of racial capitalism and environmental injustice. I examine how various twentieth-century working-class literary women characters’ positionality within the private sphere of domestic labor gives them intimate knowledge of the material conditions of poverty and resulting racial discourses of hygiene. I argue that reading dirty materials like grime, dust, and garbage and the accompanying racial discourses of hygiene as environmental justice issues in Anzia Yezierska’s Bread Givers (1924), Sanora Babb’s Whose Names are Unknown (written in the 1930s but not published until 2004), Ann Petry’s The Street (1946), and Alice Childress’s Like one of the Family (serially published in Paul Robeson’s Freedom 1951-1955 and re-published in 1956) reveals how such discourses re-direct the responsibility of environmental injustice away from its source, racial capitalism, and onto the individuals who bear the burden of environmental harm. I explore how women in these texts resist gendered imperatives of hygiene by foregoing cleaning rituals and embracing dirty material to reveal the limits of liberal individualism and re-focus blame on structures of power and injustice. Finally, I argue that dirt, which transgresses physical and social boundaries, becomes a central material through which these women defy the constructed borders of gender, the body, and nationhood. Resistance to sexism, racial violence, and environmental injustice demonstrated by women in these novels can provide a roadmap for feminist approaches to the same systems of oppression that persist in our racial capitalist society today.Item Embargo Framing Ferments: Discursive (Micro)Biopower in Fermentation Practice(University of Oregon, 2024-01-10) Beavers, Kaleb; Wald, SarahThis paper considers how The Noma Guide to Fermentation is a microbiopolitical artifact that (re)produces certain values and characteristics associated with fermentation praxis. The Noma Guide to Fermentation is a significant and popular book within fermentation circles; the text transforms the fermentation program at Noma, the restaurant, into a narrative. By discursively framing the practice of fermentation within potent ideological contexts, The Noma Guide assists human fermenters at Noma in shoring up hegemonic power via fermentation praxis. In the book, microbes regularly take on the discursive role of the natural, the magical, the cultural, and the technoscientific—often simultaneously. This portrayal of fermentation is an alluring one; it can be wielded to collapse the scale between microbiopolitics and biopolitics, in effect transforming fermentation into a practice that can harness (micro)biopower and entrench existing systems of power.