Some String or Another: Fiction and Nonfiction Stories of Connection, a creative thesis, explores patterns of change in stories from the perspective of connection and disconnection. The preface examines the effects of temporal disconnection, the relationship of conflict and connection to narrative rhythm, and the webs of connection formed during the process of creation. Included in the body of the work are six fiction stories, one metafiction story, and two nonfiction essays.

A Country With No Name is a collection of thirty-four poems with a preface explaining the style and influences of the author. The preface defends plain-language techniques in poetry, using W.H. Auden, Wislawa Szymborska, and Paul Simon as examples of poets who take a similar approach. The poems range in topic from personal and familial to societal and abstract. The main subjects encompass interpersonal relationships, romantic and otherwise, and larger concerns, such as the effects of war and modern lifestyles.

The edition of Pamela a person reads will affect his or her perception of Pamela's ascent into aristocratic society. Richardson's revisions to the fourteenth edition of Pamela, published posthumously in 1801, change Pamela's character from the 1740 first edition in such a way as to make her social climb more believable to readers outside the novel and to "readers" inside the novel. Pamela alters her language, her actions, and her role in the household by the end of the first edition; in the fourteenth edition, however, she changes in little more than her title. Pamela might begin as a novel that threatens the fabric of class hierarchies, but it ends-both within the plot and externally throughout its many editions-as a novel that stabilizes and strengthens social norms.

The Naturalist is a collection of poems with a critical preface. In this preface, titled "'Death is the mother of beauty': The Contemporary Elegy and the Search for the Dead," I examine contemporary alterations and manifestations of the traditional genre of elegy. I explore the idea that the contemporary mourner is aware of the need to search for meaning despite living in a world without a centrally believed mythology. This search exposes the mourner's need to remain connected to the dead and, by proxy, to grace. I conclude that the contemporary elegy, through metaphorical figuration, personal memory, and traditional symbolism, simultaneously employs and denies the traditional elegiac conventions of apotheosis and resurrection by reconceiving them as methods not of achieving transcendence but of embracing desire with an acceptance of the inability to transcend. The poems of The Naturalist are a collection of elegies that reflect many of the ideas brought forth in the preface.

Crazy People, a collection of short stories, presents characters and their various psychological crutches. The preface explores the concept of negative space as it applies to short fiction, manifesting itself in the form of open-ended endings, miscommunication between characters, rhetorical questions, and allusions to unspecified characters. The preface seeks to differentiate "good" space from "bad" space by citing examples from the author's own work, as well as the works of Raymond Carver, Dan Chaon, and Stanley Fish.

This data study concentrates on the past tense marking in the interlanguage (IL) of Chinese speakers of English. Following the assumptions of Hawkins & Lizska, (2003), it is assumed that unlike native speakers of English, Chinese speakers of English have a higher level of optionality within the past tense marking of their grammars. It is claimed that the primary reason for this occurrence is the lack of the functional feature T(ense) [+/-past] in Mandarin Chinese. If a particular functional feature is missing in a learner's L1 grammar, it is thought that it will be absent in one's L2 grammar as well. Three advanced Chinese speakers of English were tested on the past tense marking in their IL production. Both spontaneous oral and reading speech were used for this data analysis.

Claremont Connections is a collection of fictional short stories about the relationships between the generations of women in one family and their friends.

This dissertation argues that the four writers named above use the grotesque to illustrate the increasingly peculiar consequences of the assault of modernity on traditional Southern culture. The basic conflict between the views of Bakhtin and Kayser provides the foundation for defining the grotesque herein, and Geoffrey Harpham's concept of "margins" helps to define interior and exterior areas for the discussion. Chapter 1 lays a foundation for why the South is different from other regions of America, emphasizing the influences of Anglo-Saxon culture and traditions brought to these shores by the English gentlemen who settled the earliest tidewater colonies as well as the later influx of Scots-Irish immigrants (the Celtic-Southern thesis) who settled the Piedmont and mountain regions. This chapter also notes that part of the South's peculiarity derives from the cultural conflicts inherent between these two groups. Chapters 2 through 5 analyze selected short fiction from each of these respective authors and offer readings that explain how the grotesque relates to the drastic social changes taking place over the half-century represented by these authors. Chapter 6 offers an evaluation of how and why such traditions might be preserved. The overall argument suggests that traditional Southern culture grows out of …

Ghosts and Lovers is a collection of short stories told from the points-of-view of four related characters. Travis is a bisexual restaurant owner who fears commitment and longs for the idealistic version of love that he remembers from his past. Ezra, his boyfriend, is an artist struggling to accept the inherent imperfections of life. Travis's ex-girlfriend, Beth, attempts to come to terms with the life that she has chosen for herself. Her husband, Richard, deals with feelings of helplessness as he watches the events of his life unfold before him. By depicting the events of the story from multiple perspectives, the collection attempts to create a more objective view of reality than is ordinarily possible in fiction. An introductory preface examines the role of unreliable narrators and how reality is presented in fiction.

Phonetic mergers in American English have been studied throughout the last half century. Previous research has contributed social and phonetic explanations to the understanding of front and back vowel mergers before /l/, front vowel mergers before nasals and phonetically unconditioned back vowel mergers. Using data from the Linguistic Atlas of the Gulf States (LAGS) and the Linguistic Atlas of the Middle and South Atlantic States (LAMSAS), this thesis examines the spread of the front vowel mergers in Mary and merry and the back vowel mergers in horse and hoarse. The two complementary sources of data allow for a social and phonetic approach to the examination of the merger.

This thesis includes a novel of eight short stories and a critical preface. The preface begins with a section placing the stories in their literary historical context in regards to masculinity theory. It goes on to discuss the craft of fictionalizing autobiographical stories. Finally, the preface talks about the choice of a first person narrator. Each of the stories should stand alone, though they follow the narrator's life for a number of years. Todd Welles is the narrator of all the stories, with the exception of a few. In the stories where Todd does not do all of the narration, he is interrupted by the narration of his "friend," Percy 2 Hard Welles, III.

"Distance" and Other Stories is a collection of four short stories and a novella that explore the themes of isolation and personal revelation. The dissertation opens with a preface which describes my background as a writer and the forces that shape my work, including science fiction, technology and the internet, cultural marginalization, and Joseph Campbell's hero's motif.

Research to date on the native versus non-native English speaker teacher (NEST versus non-NEST) debate has primarily focused on teacher self-perception and performance. A neglected, but essential, viewpoint on this issue comes from English as a second language (ESL) students themselves. This study investigated preferences of adults, specifically immigrant and refugee learners, for NESTs or non-NESTs. A 34-item, 5-point Likert attitudinal survey was given to 102 students (52 immigrants, 50 refugees) enrolled in ESL programs in a large metropolitan area in Texas . After responding to the survey, 32 students volunteered for group interviews to further explain their preferences. Results indicated that adult ESL students have a general preference for NESTs over non-NESTs, but have stronger preferences for NESTs in teaching specific skill areas such as pronunciation and writing. There was not a significant difference between immigrants' and refugees' general preferences for NESTs over non-NESTs based on immigration status.