The dissertation includes a critical essay on Jorie Graham's "The Guardian Angel of the Little Utopia and a full-length collection of poetry entitled Moonlight in Quota. The essay is a critical examination which argues that Graham's poems question Western anthropocentric thought through her constant arrangement of particular images (flowers, yellow sky, leaves) and her subsequent questioning of such intellectual and linguistic arrangements. Graham grapples with ideas of perception, questions the historical concepts of truth and knowledge, and engages in linguistic play both musically and imagistically. Each section is tied together by some overriding theme or persistent image: 1.) forgetting, Mexican-American border scenes 2.) poverty and faith shown through images of marginalized characters 3.) Artistic creation as a means for the survival for the "other."

Walt Whitman was a feminist, and this assertion can be supported by excerpts from his prose, poetry, and conversation. Furthermore, the poet's circle of associates, chronology, and place of residence also lend credence to the hypothesis stating Whitman's subscription to feminist credos. A pro-feminine attitude is evident in much of Whitman's work, and his ties to the women's rights movement of the nineteenth century do influence the poet's portrayal of women. But the section of poems titled "Children of Adam" proves to be an anomaly in Walt Whitman's feminist attitudes. Instead of portraying women as equals, able to walk a path of equanimity with males, the women of "Children of Adam" are often obscured in linguistic veils or subjugated to the poet's Adamic rhetoric.

Red Dresses for Funerals contains a scholarly preface concerning the nature of factuality versus credibility in the writing of fiction. Four original short stories are included in this thesis. "A Night With Lawrence Welk" explores the relationship between a patient and student intern psychologist. "Red Dresses for Funerals" is about a wedding that plays a significant role in a variety of the characters' lives. "Trace Elements" is the only story involving young children. "Trace Elements" explores the beginning of understanding of some of the grimmer aspects of reality. "Expectations, Great and Otherwise" addresses the issue of denial. These stories are linked by their setting, a small town in Texas.

Written in the tradition of American political suspense thrillers such as "Fail-Safe" and "Seven Days In May," "Bearclaw" uses their idealistic and nationalistic elements to tell a story of an American President eager to lead the world's peoples in a quest to achieve man's "highest destiny," the conquest of space. Believing that this common goal will cause mankind to come together in a spirit of brotherhood, he misreads the historical purpose of the United States and, in the end, refuses to recognize the obvious truths of human frailty and ambition even though he has been victimized by them. The Introduction is a brief survey of the sociopolitical and literary forces which combined to create the American political suspense thriller and an attempt to define its place in the literary canon.

Eleven short fictions are introduced with a discussion of genre. Genre is looked at as being a matter of degree ranging from absolute prose on one end of the spectrum to a very specific form of poem with conventions of its own such as the Shakespearean Sonnet on the other end of the spectrum. The analysis is made in an appeal for the short-short story (or sudden fiction) as being a genre of its own. It is argued that regardless of what category a fiction may fall into (and some of the distinctions seem arbitrary), that what is most important is success at conveying a meaningful experience.

Winnie Verloc's role in "The Secret Agent" has received little initial critical attention. However, this character emerges as Conrad's hero in this novel because she is an exception to what afflicts the other characters: institutionalism. In the first chapter, I discuss the effect of institutions on the characters in the novel as well as on London, and how both the characters and the city lack hope and humanity. Chapter II is an analysis of Winnie's character, concentrating on her philosophy that "life doesn't stand much looking into," and how this view, coupled with her disturbing experience of having looked into the "abyss," makes Winnie heroic in her affirmative existentialism. Chapters III and IV broaden the focus, comparing Winnie to Conrad's other protagonists and to his other female characters.

This study traces archetypal images in selected prose fiction by Edgar Allan Poe and shows his consistent use of such imagery throughout his career, and outlines the archetypal images that Poe uses repeatedly throughout his works: the death of the beautiful woman, death and resurrection, the hero's journey to the underworld, and the quest for forbidden knowledge. The study examines Poe's use of myth to establish and uphold archetypal patterns. Poe's goal when crafting his works was the creation of a single specified effect, and to create his effects, he used the materials at hand. Some of these materials came from his own subconscious; however, a greater portion came from a lifetime of study and his own understanding of the connections between myth and archetypal images.

Throughout her life Christina Rossetti was pursued by the thought of death. Many of her poems, especially her later poems, display her concerns about death. Her early poems show death as the destroyer of mortal things, reflecting her pessimism and her sometimes naturalistic views on life. Her death wish is sometimes associated with her thwarted desire for absolute love in the world. Her religious poems describe death as the gate to heaven or to hell, the final resting place from the pains of her life. Either as her religious yearning for a better place of Resurrection or as her way of expressing her unfulfilled desire in the world, her persistent theme of death is an expression of the conflict between a sometimes skeptical, sometimes religious view.

The Usenet is a global computer conferencing system on which users can affix textual messages under 4500 different categories. It currently has approximately 4,165,000 readers, and these .readers have appropriated language by adapting it to the Usenet's culture and medium. This thesis conceptualizes the Usenet community's appropriation of language, provides insights into how media and media restrictions cause their users to appropriate language, and discusses how future media may further cause users to appropriate language. With the Usenet we have a chance to study a relatively new community bound by relatively new technology, and perhaps we can learn more about the appropriation process by studying the two.

"Scam King" is a full-length feature screenplay and follows standard script format. The idea behind "Scam King" came originally from the James Joyce short story "Two Gallants" in Dubliners. "Scam King" is, however, not an adaption of Joyce's story, but rather was inspired by the gaps in his story pertaining to the characters' way of life on the street.

Trapped in the Body of a Cheerleader is a feature-length comedic screenplay using juvenile witticisms and black-comedy to tell the story of a teenaged girl accepting her own identity. The introduction, a personal essay, offers the author's personal views towards screen writing, teen-oriented films, and contemporary screen comedy.

In this study, I examine two writing samples using a heuristic based on Richard A. Lanham's definition of bureaucratic writing in Revising Business Prose: noun-centered, abstract, passive-voiced, dense, and vague. I apply a heuristic to bureaucratic writing to see if Lanham's definition holds and if the writing aids or hinders the information flow necessary to democracy. After analyzing the samples for nominalizations, concrete/abstract terms, active/passive verbs, clear/unclear agents, textual density, and vague text/writers' accountability, I conclude that most of Lanham's definition holds; vague writing hinders the democratic process by not being accountable; and bureaucratic writing is expensive. Writers may humanize bureaucracies by becoming accountable. A complete study requires more samples from a wider source.

A poet who is a woman and a theologian writes under three pressures, or a triple bind: individuality, spirituality, and society. The desires and drives of the ego and those of spirituality often conflict, and societal expectations which gender bestows add further stress to the poet's efforts. This constant struggle destroys some poets (Plath, Sexton) and renders silent many of the rest. The following collection of poems combats the silence in four progressive sections: The first is an introductory essay which further discusses the triple bind; the second, "Between Two," illustrates spiritual relationships from despair to disillusionment; the third section, "Life in the Mirror," describes deteriorating human relationships; the final section, "Salt," presents problems resolving to a kind of negative capability. This poetry collection continues one woman's poetic struggle toward validity and acceptance.

Hemingway claims in Green Hills of Africa that "all modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn." If this basic idea is applied to his own work, elements of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn appear in some of Hemingway's Nick Adams stories and his novel The Old Man and the Sea. All major characters and several minor characters in these works share the quality of natural innocence, composed of their primitivism, sensibility, and active morality. Hemingway's Nick, Santiago, and Manolin, and Twain's Huck Finn and Jim reflect their authors' similar backgrounds and experiences and themselves come from similar environments. These environments are directly related to their continued possession and expression of their natural innocence.

A collection of poems focused primarily on rural America and the South, the creative writing thesis also includes material concerned with the history of Mexico, particularly Mexico at the time of the Spanish Conquest. The introduction combines a personal essay with critical material discussing and defining the idea of the Southern writer.

Natural Grammar provides a way for the junior high or high school English teacher to draw upon students' "natural," or subconscious, knowledge of the systems and structures of spoken English. When such subconscious knowledge is conceptualized (brought to the conscious level), the students can transfer that knowledge to their writing. Natural grammar, in other words, allows the teacher to begin with what students already know, so that he or she may help students to build upon that knowledge in the context of the students' own writing. Chapters include a brief history of grammar instruction, a synopsis of the theories that contributed to the development of natural grammar, a description of natural grammar, and suggestions for implementation of natural grammar in the classroom.

The struggle for survival of an American family revolves around Mitch Wilcox, a relief pitcher for a fictional major league baseball team. Nearing the end of his long career, he must decide whether to retire or to sign a new contract. His dilemma centers on his wife, Nicole, who argues for his retirement; and his only child, Twylight, who has run away from home. The novel traces the final two weeks of a season, during which Mitch's team battles for a pennant and he delays his decision because of events that expose the precarious nature of both his professional and personal identities. During a crucial game, his journey culminates with a choice that directs him toward a new life.

A Natural History is a collection of original poetry written over the past three years. This project represents a period of learning and growth, as well as a concentrated effort to develop an individual writing style and voice grounded in the most enduring poetic values of the past.

If I Could Live Next Door for a Day is a collection of short stories with the recurrent theme of taking life for granted. "Climbing the Fence" is a story about a sexually unfulfilled woman who has an unfulfilling affair. In "Chained Melody" a condescending young man learns about life in and out of jail. "An Educated Man" shows the inferiority of one man in the presence of others he considers more important. A deluded school counselor brings a jealous boy and his younger brother together in "Piggie and Pete," while another young man in "The Good Boy" tries to break away from his mother. Finally, a woman learns about herself and the world around her when she wins a large sum of money in "What About Ten-Fold?"

In my study on Barbara Pym's novels, the focus is first on the two basic ironies in love-marriage relations: irony of dilemma in which marriage is seen as the end of romantic love; and irony of situation in which excellent but plain-looking women are deprived of the chance to express their basic need for love. Chapter I of this study introduces the major themes and ironies in Pym's novels and the nature and functions of her irony. The following six chapters examine the two major ironies in six of Pym's twelve novels: Some Tame Gazelle, Excellent Women, Jane and Prudence, Less Than Angels, A Glass of Blessings, and A Few Green Leaves. While discussing the uniqueness of each of Pym's heroines, I also explore how Pym underwent changes in her views of love and marriage and how she attempted to keep a balance between her romanticism and her sense of irony. Pym's other six novels are discussed in Chapter VIII, the concluding chapter.

This dissertation presents a thematic study of the novels of John Nichols. Intended as an introduction to his major works of fiction, this study discusses the central themes and prominent characteristics of his seven novels and considers the impact of the Southwest on his work. Chapter One presents biographical information about Nichols, focusing on his political awakening and subsequent move to Taos, New Mexico. A visit to Guatemala, after the publication of The Sterile Cuckoo. his first novel, brought Nichols to a realization that America was not a benevolent world power. He began to consider capitalism a voracious, destructive economic system, a view which informed the subjects and themes of his five novels written after The Wizard of Loneliness. In 1969, Nichols left New York City, moving to Taos, New Mexico, an area with a history of physical and economic aggression against its predominantly Native American and Hispanic population. The five polemical novels, all set in northern New Mexico, were written after this move. Chapters Two through Four discuss Nichols's seven novels, analyzing theme and reviewing critical response. /V Chapter Two discusses The Sterile Cuckoo (1965) and The Wizard of Loneliness (1966), novels written prior to Nichols's political awakening. Both …

Very little of the huge corpus of Beowulf criticism has been directed at discovering the function and meaning of myth in the poem. Scholars have noted many mythological elements, but there has never been a satisfactory explanation of the poet's use of this material. A close analysis of Beowulf reveals that myth does, in fact, inform its structure, plot, characters and even imagery. More significant than the poet's use of myth, however, is the way he interlaces the historical and Christian elements with the mythological story to reflect his understanding of the cyclic nature of human existence. The examination in Chapter II of the religious component in eighth-century Anglo-Saxon culture demonstrates that the traditional Germanic religion or mythology was still very much alive. Thus the Beowulf poet was certainly aware of pre-Christian beliefs. Furthermore, he seems to have perceived basic similarities between the old and new religions, and this understanding is reflected in the poem. Chapter III discusses the way in which the characterization of the monsters is enriched by their mythological connotations. Chapter IV demonstrates that the poet also imbued the hero Beowulf with mythological significance. The discussion in Chapter V of themes and type-scenes reveals the origins of …

This paper examines the metaphoric structures that underlie Chopin's major novel, The Awakening, as well as those underlying selected short stories. Drawing on the modern theory of metaphor described by Mark Turner, George Lakoff, and Mark Johnson, the author argues that conceptual metaphors are the structural elements that underlie our experiences, thoughts, and words, and that their presence is revealed through our everyday language. Since these conceptual structures are representative of human thought and language, they are also present in literary texts, and specifically in Chopin's texts. Conceptual metaphors and the linguistic forms that result from them are so basic a part of our thinking that we automatically construct our utterances by means of them. Accordingly, conceptual metaphor mirrors human thought processes, as demonstrated by the way we describe our experiences.

The Evolution of Dexter and Me is a collection of one vignette and four short stories. All of the stories deal with young men figuring out and coping with their daily life and environment. The "Dexter stories" deal with a character I developed and evolved, Dexter, a sane young man trying to find the best way to cope in an insane system.