Sociolinguists working in Northern urban areas have shown that Hispanics who come in contact with African Americans sometimes acquire features of African American vernacular English (AAVE). However, the acquisition of AAVE features by Hispanics in the South has yet to be documented. Specifically, no one has studied the kind of English that Hispanics in Texas are acquiring. The present study investigates this issue through research in an inner-city area of Dallas: Oak Cliff. During the past twenty-five years, the population of Oak Cliff has changed from a largely African American community to include a substantial number of Hispanics. Though their neighborhoods remain fairly separate, sports and gangs provide an arena for extended contact. This study investigates the extent to which AAVE grammatical features are being acquired by bilingual Hispanic adolescents who hang out with African Americans. The analysis for this paper focuses on the relationship between contact and depth of acquisition of AAVE syntactic constraints on the use the copula (is/are, be). Preliminary results show that be+V+ing as an habitual form has been incorporated into the grammar of these subjects, suggesting fundamental changes towards an AAVE grammatical system.

In my preface I have tried to show what a diary is, why they might be of interest to others, why I think they are valid and should be considered as such. I have defended my diary as being worthy material for a thesis, or myself as worthy of being called a writer. (Traditionally, writing in a diary doesn't qualify one as being a writer, even though you might write millions of pages and spend your entire lives doing it.) Edited selections of my diary make up the body of the thesis. These selections are divided into four main sections which suggested themselves during editing. To summarize the diary as a whole, I would say it's about human relationships.

The Woman in the Box is Smiling is a collection of poems, prose poems, short-short stories, and short stories. The introduction is a personal essay which discusses form as a device used to gain control over subject matter.

This comic romantic novel engages the question of how the Christianity of the southern, fundamentalist world of the Texas bible belt, finding its primary cultural assumptions about human existence challenged by the more confusing elements of a modern sensibility, a sensibility over-laden with strange-attractors, mechanistic psychologies, relativistic physics and ethics, evolutionary premises, newly proclaimed rights and freedoms, a deterioration in cultural political naivete, and the advent of an increasingly incomprehensible set of technologies, can survive. The "central" character is a young, slightly deformed man raised by his ostensibly "Christian" grandparents who, through a rather odd set of legal circumstances and physical events, not only become wealthy, but somewhat powerful in their immediate community. He finds himself involved with a young woman, raised in an equally "Christian" household, but, as is true of any romantic plot, the relationship between the two is destined, by virtue of circumstance and the meddling of other characters, to struggle and mishap. In the end, the text, in its own fashion, asserts that the Christian impulse can survive the modern era by virtue of one of its central tenets: faith, in the Christian world, is very much the same as life itself, a process of waiting …

This dissertation approaches the work of South African/Botswanan novelist Bessie Head, especially the novel A Question of Power, as positioned within the critical framework of the postcolonial paradigm, the genius of which accommodates both African and African American literature without recourse to racial essentialism. A central problematic of postcolonial literary criticism is the ideological stance postcolonial authors adopt with respect to the ideology of the metropolis, whether on the one hand the stances they adopt are collusive, or on the other oppositional. A key contested concept is that of universality, which has been widely regarded as a witting or unwitting tool of the metropolis, having the effect of denigrating the colonial subject. It is my thesis that Bessie Head, neither entirely collusive nor oppositional, advocates an Africanist universality that paradoxically eliminates the bias implicit in metropolitan universality.

"The Theme of Isolation in Selected Short Fiction of Kate Chopin, Katherine Anne Porter, and Eudora Welty" examines certain prototypical natures of isolation as recurrent and underlying themes in selected short fiction of Chopin, Porter, and Welty. Despite the differing backgrounds of the three Southern women writers, and despite the variety of issues they treat, the theme of isolation permeates most of their short fiction. I categorize and analyze their short stories by the nature and the treatment of the varieties of isolation. The analysis and comparison of their short stories from this particular perspective enables readers to link the three writers and to acknowledge their artistic talent and grasp of human psychology and situations.